
Class 

Book . 

GopyrigM? 



COFWHGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE VALUES EVERLASTING 



BOOKS BY FATHER GARESCHE 

Published by Benziger Brothers 

In Same Uniform Series 

Each, Net, $1.25; Postage, 10 Cents 

LIFE'S LESSONS. Some Useful Teachings Of 
Every Day. 

Will be read and should be read by people 
who want to turn to best accounts their 
talents. — Ecclesiastical Review. 

THE PATHS OF GOODNESS. Some Helpful 
Thoughts on 'Spiritual Progress. 

It is a most readable book. — Catholic Bulletin, 

YOUR OWN HEART. Some Helps to understand it. 
The Author knows how to talk of men's faults 
so as to inspire them to do better. — The Fort- 
nightly Review. 

YOUR SOUL'S 'SALVATION. Instructions on 
Personal Holiness. 

We know of no spiritual book which deserves 
to have a larger vogue amongst Catholics. — ■ 
Ros'ary Magazine. 

THE THINGS IMMORTAL. Spiritual thoughts 
for everyday reading. 

The subjects are most important, the treatment 
simple, practical and persuasive. — Catholic 
World. 

YOUR INTERESTS ETERNAL. Our service to 
Our Heavenly Father. 

He presents immortal truths in a direct way 
that enlists attention and arouses zeal. — : 
Catholic School Journal. 

THE MOST BELOVED WOMAN. The Preroga- 
tives and Glories of the Blessed Mother of God. 
It is enjoyable, very interesting, edifying and 
highly instructive. — Dominicana. 

YOUR NEIGHBOR AND YOU. Our dealings 
with those about us. ' 

Should be in every Catholic library and every 
busy Catholic should read it. — St. Xavier's 
Calendar* 

SOCIAL ORGANIZATION IN PARISHES. 
Net, $2.75. Postage 15 Cents. 

Brimful of ideas, it will be of practical aidto 
Reverend Pastors in their varied Parish 
Activities. 




MADONNA 
Sassoferrato 



L 



The 
Values Everlasting 



Some Aids to Lift 
Our Hearts on High 



BY ... 



•,v 



REV. EDWARD F. GARESCHE, S. J. 




New York, Cincinnati, Chicago 

BENZIGER BROTHERS 

PRINTERS TO THE PUBLISHERS OF 

HOLT APOSTOLIC SEE I BENZIGER'S MAGAZINE 

1922 



tSJmprttm jjjJniBsL 



vV* 



Francis X. McMenamy, S.J. 



Praep. Prov. Missourianitz, 

Arthur J. Scanlan, S.T.D. 

Censor Librorum. 

,3Iinprtjrratur~ 

►J« Patrick J. Hayes, D.D. 

Archbishop of New York, 
New York. May 25, 1922 



0»* 



Copyright. 1922. by Benziger Brothers 



CI.A683140 



2)eMcation 

TO THE MOST BLESSED VIRGIN MARY 
TOWER OF IVORY 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Dedication 5 

Preface 9 

The Greatness of the Little . 11 

It Might Have Been .... 25 

On Being Made Clean .... 36 

The Cheering Thought of Heaven 48 

Conformity 62 

God's Condescension .... 76 

The Richness of Our Heritage . 87 

Confidence in Mary . . . . 10 1 

The Precious Half Hour . . . 115 

Our Devotions 126 

Turning Life to Prayer . . . 137 

A Strange Delusion 147 

Things as They Are . . . . 158 

Courage 167 

Celestial Company . . . . 177 



PREFACE 

A FLOOD of worldly thoughts, worldly 
ideas and estimates invade the mind 
nowadays on the wings of the ephem- 
eral print which is so insistently circulated 
by powerful agencies everywhere. We must 
read, and so much of the reading matter that 
is forced upon our attention, teaches insidi- 
ously the low values and sordid outlook of 
the worldling, forever intent on the things of 
time and quite forgetful of the great issues 
of eternity. 

To protect ourselves from the contagion 
of this pervading worldliness, we should, in 
justice to our own soul, turn deliberately 
aside now and then to dwell upon the values 
everlasting. As men of old used, when pass- 
ing through contagious plague spots, to hold 
to their nostrils a sweet smelling flower, to 
guard themselves from the infection, so we 
should hold to the nostrils of our soul the 
sweet flower of some heavenly thoughts, to 
guard against the poisonous exhalations of 
the world. 



io Preface 

The papers in the present volume are 
meant to aid us in lifting up our thoughts 
toward the eternal things. They are brief 
and various, so as to interest and occupy a 
leisure hour. The writer sends them forth 
with a prayer for all who may read, and he 
asks in turn from those who may read these 
lines a prayer for the writer thereof. 

Feast of the Apparition of Our Lady of 
Lourdes. 



THE VALUES EVERLASTING 



THE GREATNESS OF THE LITTLE 

For our judgments of men we are so 
dependent on what we see, that it is 
usually great and striking deeds that 
stir us to admiration. The uncommon and 
the spectacular attract us. Great exploits, 
sudden shows of courage, feats of intellectual 
prowess, deeds of physical daring, excite our 
wonder and compel our praise. But the 
silent heroism of the many humble and hid- 
den folk among us, scarcely moves us to any 
admiration at all. 

With God, of course, it is quite otherwise. 
He looks beyond the outward show of things 
and searches the hidden heart. The glitter 
and glory of outward deeds cannot deceive 
His eyes, as they deceive our own. So He 
loves the heroism that has, to urge and spur 
it on, no stir of outward pomp and glory, 
but only the calm, firm, steadfast sense of 

ii 



12 The Greatness of the Little 

duty, the love of God and man. God loves 
the heroism of little things! 

This world, which God has made to carry 
out His great designs, is admirably well 
suited to give opportunity and scope for this 
heroism of little things. The chances to 
perform great exploits come but seldom in 
the way of any man. To some of us they 
never come at all. But all about every one's 
pathway, offering themselves at every hour, 
sometimes coming in crowds, besieging our 
every step — throng opportunities for heroic 
courage and fidelity in the faithful doing of 
little things. 

The course of every one's life, if we take 
it by moments, is, after all, only a long pro- 
cession of little things. One may be a king, 
or he may be a pope, and seem to the world 
at large a person whose concerns are all 
majestic and impressive. But he himself 
sees wearily that the daily cycle of his life 
is only a tedious round of little duties, coming 
with the tireless moments of the tireless days, 
and each one making some new demand upon 
mind or heart for heroic and exhausting 
fidelity in little things. We hear of men 
whose physical strength gives way under the 
strain of such high affairs as the government 



The Greatness of the Little 13 

of a nation or the ruling of an important 
portion of the Church. Do you suppose 
that it was any great function of State which 
wearied them and drained the vigor of their 
lives? Great functions of State come sel- 
dom, and are usually well prepared for; and 
there is cordial excitement and sympathy and 
applause to hearten and to cheer. No ; what 
wore them out was the constant, ceaseless 
round of exacting duties which made up the 
little things of daily life. To do a great and 
startling deed now and again is a tonic and 
a stimulant. But, oh, — the countless little 
acts of hidden duty — where is the cordial 
or the tonic in these ? 

This is the reason why one sometimes 
finds persons who are deplorably deficient in 
the performance of little duties belonging to 
their state of life and who yet surprise their 
neighbors and all who know them best, by 
some heroism of devotion, some surprising 
act of renunciation, or some startling stroke 
of self-sacrifice. Their courage was not 
great enough, it may be, to bear the strain 
of every-day and petty faithfulness. They 
winced and yielded at the pain of heroic 
fidelity in little things. But when a sudden 
opportunity of doing a single striking deed 



14 The Greatness of the Little 

of self-renunciation came upon them, they 
found heart of grace for that moment of 
sublime accomplishment. They had strength 
enough to be heroes, but not enough to be 
heroic in little things! 

Fiction abounds in such characters, and 
e very-day life has its share of them. Occa- 
sionally, when a great catastrophe occurs, 
some obscure man or woman, of whom no 
one has heard before, comes into sudden 
and glorious prominence by doing a heroic 
action. Of course this heroism of a moment 
is sometimes only the flowering out of long- 
continued and hidden faithfulness of virtue 
in the trifling things of the day's routine. 
The staunch spirit of self-sacrifice, grown 
into a sturdy habit by constant exercise in 
the little things of life, shows itself gloriously 
in moments of supreme need or danger. But 
not always. Sometimes Tom or Mary blos- 
soms suddenly out into a heroic action, with 
no preceding practice of great faithfulness or 
constancy to prepare them for the noble 
deed. A sudden occasion, a strong and mov- 
ing impulse to do something unselfish and 
great, and Tom leaps out from the crowd 
and amazes all who knew him — and none 
more than himself — by playing the 



The Greatness of the Little 15 

impromptu hero, and covering himself with 
momentary glory. It is the affair of an 
instant. There was no time for his fiery 
enthusiasm to cool away. The very heat of 
bold resolve which moved him to attempt 
the deed, carries him through and brings him 
safely out of it, without space to falter or 
repent. It is a great help to be committed 
to a noble line of action with no way out and 
every one watching us go through with it. 
Given the proper incentives, most of us could 
be heroes for one occasion. 

But contrast this heroism of an hour, this 
showy and public doing of a striking deed, 
with the slow, dull, hidden heroism which one 
must practice if he will be greatly faithful 
in all the little duties of life. There is no 
question then of a swift, exalted instant of 
spectacular self-sacrifice, with the applause 
of other men to cheer us, and our own hearts 
beating high with enthusiasm, and the stress 
of a great occasion keying us up to heroic 
courage and sublime achievement. No, 
there is question rather of the long, weary 
stretches of dull days with wearing duties, 
of long hours when we might be doing our 
own sweet will and taking our own good 
pleasure, of long moments when the weight 






1 6 The Greatness of the Little 

and pressure of monotonous toil grows intol- 
erable from the thought of so many similar 
moments, which reach behind us and stretch 
before. To keep steady and cheerful 
through the lights and shadows of our life's 
long travels, to keep strong and true to the 
great ideals which Faith holds up before us 
in spite of all alluring byways of pleasure and 
ease, to be good when goodness is common- 
place and wearisome beyond expression, and 
when wickedness, in the false light of this 
world, is attractive and alluring — this is the 
every-day heroism, which life requires of the 
common man. Who that has any deep 
experience thereof, will ever say sincerely 
that a momentary feat of glorious self-for- 
getfulness and courage can ever be truly 
called harder than those years of painful, 
dull fidelity and sacrifice? 

Most men shrink from such heights of 
constant faithfulness and honor as this hero- 
ism of every day demands. They allow 
themselves little exemptions from the stern 
ways of consistent fidelity in little things. 
They take the edge off unpleasant obligations 
by small concessions to their own small weak- 
nesses. Where the harness of duty rubs, 
they ease the hurt by compromises. Perhaps 



The Greatness of the Little 17 

this is the reason why they find it hard to 
see how hidden and every-day lives can ever 
be heroic. Their life is not, because they 
have no heart for the endless sacrifice which 
can make dull lives sublime. But only let 
us try to do all the trivial tasks of every day 
supremely well, and we shall see what hero- 
ism lies in little things. 

We have said that it is God's will to offer 
us all great opportunities of being heroic in 
these small occasions. The material for noble 
fidelity and courage lies ready to hand in all 
the trials and duties of the day. Possibly 
it has never occurred to you to view your 
commonplace life as the theatre of glorious 
and lofty deeds. You feel obscure and little, 
in the midst of this great w r orld of men and 
women — so many of them far above you in 
all that demands attention and wins esteem. 
But you may become conspicuous and noble 
at any moment of your days — noble at least 
and conspicuous in the sight of God and of 
His angels — by being great and heroic in 
little things. The duties which harass and 
oppress you with a weariness that no man 
on earth, it seems to you, can lighten or 
comprehend, are only so many doors to 
greatness. The little slurs and slights you 



1 8 The Greatness of the Little 

meet with from other men and women, are 
matter for grand forbearance and forgive- 
ness. The opportunities for self-sacrifice 
and self-denial which line your way, are but 
material for conquests and victories which 
might almost make the angels envious! 
Look over your days in the light of these 
reflections, and see how God has meant your 
whole life to be a glorious battlefield, with 
chances at every step for hand-to-hand 
encounters and mighty feats of arms ! 

Discouragement, in one form or another, 
is one of the great causes of our sloth and 
small accomplishment. Well, here is a cure 
and a charm against low spirits and discour- 
agement — to think of the heroic possibilities 
of our dull and common lives. How can 
any one pine and fret at his lack of oppor- 
tunity, when there lie ready at hand occasions 
for unselfish devotion and glorious self-sacri- 
fice which can please the hosts of heaven! 

The same all-wise Creator, who has 
planned His world to give all men this 
chance to practice the heroism of little 
things, has been at great pains too, if one 
can speak so of Him, to make it clear to us 
all, that it is His will, that we should practice 
this commonplace heroism. His command- 



The Greatness of the Little 19 

ments and His counsels all point us on to 
steadfast fidelity in little things and great. 

The command He gave to our first parents 
in the beginning, may have seemed to them 
but a little thing, yet it was most momentous 
in its consequences. Many of their descend- 
ants find it hard to see why God still gives 
us, through His Church, onerous precepts, 
concerning seemingly little things. The 
abstaining from meat, the keeping of holy- 
days and fast-days, the marriage laws of the 
Church, the regulations of dioceses and par- 
ishes — they sometimes seem, to the unwise, 
nothing but fussing over trifles. Yet, these 
seeming trifles are in reality momentous 
things, for they measure our love and fidelity 
and obedience toward the One Eternal God, 
the Lord of all. 

The most solemn and striking lesson of 
the importance of little things, of little duties 
and little cares, was given us by the Word 
Made Flesh. The pagan nations of old in 
their longing for some nearer knowledge of 
God had woven together many curious and 
fanciful legends of gods who came to seek 
adventure among the sons of men. But all 
their notions of what a god would do, if he 
were to come on earth, ran upon splendid 



20 The Greatness of the Little 

feats and startling wonders, showy exploits 
and stupendous deeds, done in the face of an 
astounded world. Nothing but the magnifi- 
cent, the striking and the heroic was worthy, 
so they judged, of the gods who walked with 
men. 

When the true God of Heaven did vouch- 
safe to come on earth to show mankind the 
godlike way of living, how singular and 
unthought of were His deeds! He did 
indeed live a life which was most magnifi- 
cently heroic, but His heroism for thirty long 
years, was the heroism of little things. His 
days went by in simple obedience, in painful 
labor, in the thousand small acts of service, 
kindness and forbearance which make up the 
plain man's gray and uneventful days. All 
that the Gospels find to say of Him, during 
this time, is contained in one small sentence 
of St. Luke, "He went down with His par- 
ents into Galilee and was subject to them." 
For thirty years, with Mary and with 
Joseph, He practiced the arduous and hidden 
heroism of an inconspicuous and laborious 
life. 

Yet no one but God Himself can ever 
comprehend the full and glorious heroism of 
every act and thought and word of all those 



The Greatness of the Little 21 

thirty years. Not a moment but bore its 
due and utter weight of glory to God, of 
good to men, of wonder and joy to all the 
watching hosts of heaven. Not an act of 
the God-Man, but was in perfect and just 
accord with the will of His Heavenly Father 
— in heroic and complete self-immolation of 
His human will to the plans of God. 

This accord is, after all, what makes up 
the true and splendid heroism of little things 
— the perfect harmony between the details 
of our lives and the designs of God's holy 
will. He does not disdain — that infinitely 
great and glorious Lord — to have a care 
even of the littlest things. Seen from the 
heights of His Infinity, nothing is great or 
little, save in the sense that all things are 
great which give Him glory, and all are 
unspeakably vile which contravene His Will. 
So that not the least of our daily actions can 
escape His eyes and nothing can fail to please 
Him which is done in full concord with His 
Law. This is one of the lessons we have all 
of us most need to learn, and it was to teach 
us this that the Saviour of men spent thirty 
years in the obscure cottage in hidden 
Nazareth. He and Mary and Joseph were 



22 The Greatness of the Little 

seeking in every little thing the great and 
perfect will of God. 

All the men and women who have most 
gloriously followed the example of Christ's 
perfect life have done so by heroic faithful- 
ness in little things. Read the lives of the 
saints, and you will find their hidden faith- 
fulness in the small details of their laborious 
perfection, more wonderful than their mira- 
cles, and more moving than their great, pub- 
lic exploits of charity and zeal. The slow 
martyrdom of a life of absolute self-sacrifice 
and fidelity, is a greater proof of love and 
holiness than the power to move mountains 
or to bid the sun stand still. 

Those holy souls, in every state of life, 
who practice this hidden heroism of little 
things, are the salt of the earth, and the light 
of the world. Think of the patient, and 
devoted fathers and mothers who pray and 
toil in a willing slavery from dawn to dusk, 
keeping their little flock. Think of the 
priests, who work in God's vineyard, in the 
loneliness of little parishes, living their daily 
round of solitude and poverty that they may 
feed the little ones of Christ. Think of the 
men and women, vowed to the threefold 
heroism of the religious life, whose labors 



The Greatness of the Little 23 

He in every land throughout the civilized and 
savage regions of the earth, who live hidden 
and self-immolating lives in strictest imita- 
tion of that perfect life at Nazareth ! These 
men and women are heroic indeed. The 
bravest soldier who ever led a forlorn hope 
upon a battlefield, would shrink from taking 
up their faithful round of daily toil and 
prayer. Their silent and unselfish devotion 
puts all show and pretentiousness to shame. 
The reverence in which their lives are held 
by those who know them best, is one of the 
greatest of all encomiums upon the heroism 
of little things ! 

We ourselves should draw some cheerful 
inspiration from the thought of the greatness 
which lies in doing our little duties well. 
There they are, forever with us, forever 
appealing, forever pressing with unceasing 
urgency — that host of daily tasks. They 
are our supreme opportunity, if only we will 
choose to do them perfectly. They hold out 
to us, with a thousand eager hands, a thou- 
sand chances of winning heavenly fame. 
Our little duties to God, our little duties to 
our neighbor, and to ourselves, are, each one 
in its distinctive way, new opportunities for 
admirable fidelity and self-denial. Let us 



24 The Greatness of the Little 

greet them with a hearty welcome when they 
come upon us hereafter, little ways of being 
generous, little ways of being unselfish, help- 
ful and kind. If we will have courage to 
practice these little heroisms of hidden fidel- 
ity to principle, these little martyrdoms to 
duty, what peace and calm and happiness of 
soul will come to us here on earth, and what 
surpassing glory hereafter! It is little 
things that lead us to perfection, and true 
perfection is the heroism of little things. 



IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN 

There is an inexpressible pathos about 
lost opportunities. One sees it in 
many instances of life. "The sad- 
dest words of tongue or pen," as we are 
reminded in an antique and ill-rhymed dis- 
tich, "are those sad words, 'It might have 
been.' " To have had an opportunity and 
squandered it, to have had a chance and lost 
it, awakens regret in the heart, which is no 
less keen because so unavailing. What a 
strange thing is time! We are carried on 
past the hours and the days, and at each 
moment opportunities, like lovely vistas, 
open to either side. But the current of time 
is swift and we can never return. The past 
opportunities are irrevocably behind us, and 
no effort of ours can bring us back to them 
again. 

"If you do not ask me what time is," says 
St. Augustine, "I know; but if you ask me 
what it is, I find I do not know." What we 
know of time is its outward reality, its irre- 

25 



12,6 It Might Have Been 

vocable movement, its unvarying current, the 
speed with which it carries us on and never 
releases us to wander back again to the 
things that were, except by the unavailing 
and shadowy paths of memory. And we 
lose, in the swift rush of time, so many 
opportunities ! 

It has been said by some of the saints who 
were blessed with revelations from Almighty 
God, that if we could see the graces prepared 
even for ordinary men and women, would 
they but accept their daily opportunities, we 
should think that such favors were reserved 
for the greatest saints. How many of these 
high achievements, how exceedingly many of 
the graces which God has laid up for us, we 
have lost and left behind us by neglecting our 
momentary opportunities ! It is a common- 
place in the spiritual life, that one grace 
leads to another. When we are offered 
some chance of doing a good act and accept 
it, it is not merely the merit of that act that 
we gain, but we take in our hands one 
link of a golden chain of such graces; and if 
we accept each one as it comes, this chain of 
the favors of God will lead us slowly onward 
and upward toward 'the heights of perfect 
virtue. But if we loose from our hand that 






77 Might Have Been 27 

one golden link of present opportunity, then 
we lose the whole chain, for one link is caught 
up with another, and quitting our grasp on 
one, we drop them all. One sees impressive 
illustrations of this in the lives of some of the 
saints. An opportunity which seemingly was 
of little moment, to practice an act of virtue 
or to show their love for God was eagerly 
seized by them, leading them on to greater 
effort. It was the instant opening and clos- 
ing of a door to great vistas of sanctity, as 
they passed by on the road of life. With 
love and desire they leapt in, before the door 
of the moment's opportunity was closed to 
them, and thereafter their feet walked in 
new paths and they aspired after heavenly 
things. The story of St. Camillus de Lellis 
offers an instance of such a prompt grasping 
of a moment's grace. He was a broken- 
down soldier, discharged, disabled from the 
wars. At the age of nineteen he was already 
an inveterate gambler, a brawler and an out- 
cast even from the rough circles of the camp. 
To gain his daily bread he took some menial 
work in the building of a monastery, and 
one day a compassionate monk came out to 
speak a few words of admonition and exhor- 
tation to the broken soldier. At that 



28 It Might Have Been 

moment the grace of God touched the young 
man's heart. He felt contrition for what 
he had done, resolved to change his ways, 
and gave the rest of his days to the practice 
of heroic sanctity. 

How many such impulses have come to us I 
Yet Camillus, brawler, gambler as he was, 
listened to the Heavenly Invitation. His 
heart leapt up to meet the grace of God. 
He seized the opportunity, was moved to 
contrition, became desirous of amendment. 
He confessed his sins and began the way of 
a new life. From that moment's taking of 
the opportunity of God's grace and pardon, 
Camillus the sinner went forth to be Camillus 
the saint. 

It was so, too, with St. John of God. A 
sermon so touched his heart (as how many 
times sermons have touched our own), that 
he resolved at once to be quit of the world 
and to live for God alone. He rushed from 
the church in such fervor of contrition and 
love of God that men thought him, for a 
while, a fool. But from the moment when 
he rose to that heavenly opportunity, he was 
a changed man and an heroic servant of God. 
It was so also with St. Francis of Assisi. 
He stripped himself of all things, put on a 



It Might Have Been 29 

sackcloth marked with the sign of the cross 
and went forth to fulfill with rigorous 
observance the counsel of poverty. It was 
so with all the saints, so with Ignatius when 
on his bed of pain he perceived the difference 
between the delights of the world and the 
delights of God's service, and made the great 
renunciation. The heights of prayer and 
sacrifice to which the saints arose, depended 
on their seizing of momentary opportunities. 

It is the same with all souls who are sin- 
cerely zealous in serving God. All goodness 
is the result of using good opportunities. 
No amount of dreamy wishing, no abstract 
speculation, will make any one holy. Holi- 
ness comes from the taking of the oppor- 
tunities of every day for self-sacrifice, good 
deeds, faith, hope and charity in action, and 
all the exercises of virtue that make up a 
holy life. God's graces descend on us at 
instants; they offer themselves to us for the 
moment; the moment passes; the grace 
passes away; the opportunity is either taken 
or has been refused, and we are richer or 
poorer for all eternity. 

It is a tremendous thought, that our 
opportunities run forward and impress them- 
selves, for our weal or loss, upon eternity. 



30 It Might Have Been 

Eternity is the logical and irrevocable conse- 
quence of our use of passing opportunities. 
We shall be glorious for all eternity in just 
the proportion that we use the opportunities 
of time. A thousand crowding chances, met 
with day after day in the ordinary course of 
our lives, offer us occasions for acts of faith, 
of hope and of love both toward God and 
our neighbor. Little words of charity, the 
opportunity for small deeds of goodness, 
small services to our neighbor and the 
Church which lie in our path, the myriad 
interweavings of good deeds which make up 
an ordinary Christian life — these things are 
seemingly slight and infinitesimal in them- 
selves, a mere web of passing opportunities, 
yet they are the stuff of which is woven the 
cloth of gold of our eternal glory. Every 
time we neglect and pass over the chance of a 
good deed offered us, we lose, so to say, one 
strand in the bright robe which we shall wear 
before the eyes of the Almighty. Every least 
opportunity seized upon and made use of; 
every good action which we perform for the 
love of God, is another golden thread to help 
to clothe us before God and His saints in 
the days to be. Throughout our years 
we have been using or refusing our momen- 



It Might Have Been 3 r 

tary opportunities, and there is ready for us 
now, through God's mercy and kindness, a 
garment of heavenly glory more or less 
beautiful, more or less richly adorned with 
the gold that does not tarnish and the jewels 
that will not perish, according as we have 
made use of or neglected them. 

Viewed in this light, how immensely 
important even the small chances of life 
become! Consider the many moments in 
which we can pause and make an act of love 
of God. To love God for His own sake is 
the most profitable of all actions. One such 
act clears the soul of mortal sin, adorns it 
with greater graces, and gains merit for eter- 
nity in the eyes of God. Granted a little 
thoughtfulness, a little care, and our life is 
full of opportunities for making an act of 
God's love. Both misfortune and joy, full- 
ness, and need, happiness and distress are 
continually reminding us of our dependence 
on God, our need of His infinite goodness 
and love. The shadows of earth point us 
toward God, just as the brightness of Heaven 
reminds us of Him. In pain or sorrow our 
thoughts turn to the Father who can relieve 
all our distresses. Fullness and content 
remind us of Him from whom all blessings 



32 It Might Have Been 

flow. In Him we live and move and have 
our being, and all things conspire both with- 
out and within us to remind us continually 
of the mercy and tenderness of God and to 
multiply our opportunities for loving and 
serving Him. 

It is a little and an easy action to love 
God, so far as concerns the labor and effort 
required. It is an endlessly holy and pre- 
cious, weighty and glorious thing to love 
Him, so far as concerns the merit and dig- 
nity of the action. 

How life multiplies and presses upon us 
opportunities for that other exercise of 
Divine Charity which, with the love of God, 
fulfills the law — to wit: the love and help 
of our neighbor! Our neighbor is, as it 
were, the representative of God for us. 
Since we can neither benefit nor help the 
Infinite Goodness who is the object of our 
love, He gives us our neighbor in His stead 
whom we can benefit and save. "Whatso- 
ever you do to one of these My least 
brethren," He says, "you do it to Me." God 
wishes us to understand that in our neighbor 
we have endless opportunities for serving 
and loving Him. 

In many ways we have been offered 



It Might Have Been 33 

chances for helping, serving, saving even, 
those about us. How have we used those 
golden opportunities? There is no one to 
whom such thoughts will not bring some 
sense of loss and of regret. Weak and 
fickle creatures that we are, we do the evil 
that we will not, and we omit the good that 
we would do. It is hard for us to keep in 
mind these great and eternal truths, for we 
are so set about and distracted by the things 
of time. Therefore, looking back over the 
years, who will not be struck sad at the mul- 
tiplied loss of opportunities? Consider how 
long you have lived on earth, and reflect 
how constantly each moment of your con- 
scious life has crowded upon you the golden 
gifts of opportunity! We are all but too 
sadly aware how often we have neglected, 
missed and squandered our chances of grace 
and merit. 

The fruit of these reflections must be to 
stir us to desire to seize our opportunities 
yet to come. We shall have to gird our- 
selves with resolution and strengthen our 
hearts with charity, so as to make use at 
least of the hours that still remain before 
that night cometh wherein no man can work. 
Thanks to the mercy of God, our oppor- 



34 It Might Have Been 

tunities are never over, until life itself is 
done. Bright and exquisite as were the 
vistas of possible achievement in God's serv- 
ice which have passed and which lie forever 
behind us, His mercy is continually opening 
up to us still newer chances of serving and 
loving Him. It may even be that in His 
mercy the opportunities to come will surpass 
those which have gone before. By resolv- 
ing now to seize upon them as they arise, 
we shall be able to do great things for God 
and our neighbor before we die. Happy 
for us that we are offered so many, many 
opportunities ! 

God woos us with manifold graces. His 
blessings are never exhausted, His mercy 
never ceases, until we die. Then indeed the 
way of our opportunities is closed; the door 
is sealed forever. We shall then, for all 
eternity, live and be what we choose to be 
now during our time of probation, when 
opportunities are thick and bright about u$. 

Let us take these thoughts to heart 
betimes. There will come a day, alas, when, 
having by the mercy of God gained purga- 
tory, we shall, in that wakeful darkness, 
think over with sorrow and regret the days 
of our life. Oh, then how we shall linger 



// Might Have Been 35 

upon and regret each lost opportunity of our 
life! In that clear and marvelous self- 
knowledge, in that complete vision of the 
value of eternity and the nothingness of time, 
in that light which memory will throw upon 
our life, we shall see in its fullness the price- 
lessness of every opportunity of merit and 
of glory, and the realization will be perhaps 
one of the keenest of the pangs of purgatory. 
How wise we shall be if now, while there is 
yet time, we avert this fruitless suffering. 
Let us make amends, in the time that 
remains, for all our lost opportunities. Let 
us seek to surpass ourselves in vigilance and 
fervor, seizing each new occasion for self- 
sacrifice, faith, love and effort in the cause 
of God and our neighbor during those few 
and brief hours that still remain of our time 
of trial and opportunity on earth. 



ON BEING MADE CLEAN 

The doctrine of purgatory is hardly 
counted, by many pious Christians, 
among the sources of their spiritual 
consolation. In fact, the thought of purga- 
tory is, to most of us, a disquieting thought, 
quite the reverse of consoling. It is a teach- 
ing of our Faith that there is after this life 
a state of punishment, wherein the souls of 
those who have departed this life in the grace 
of God but with venial sins unforgiven, with 
the punishment of forgiven sins not yet 
atoned for, must abide in banishment from 
heaven until they have satisfied the justice 
of God and are cleansed and fit for heaven. 
But to suggest to us that in this doctrine is 
to be found the source of a truly consoling 
assurance, is perhaps to go beyond what 
we have ever thought concerning purgatory. 
Still, if we consider the name which is 
given to this place or state of pain, we shall 
see the glimmerings of that consolation, 

shining like a distant light through the 

36 



On Being Made Clean 37 

shadows of the misty land of atonement. 
For purgatory means a place of cleansing, 
and so we are assured by the very existence 
of this state of purgation, that when we 
emerge therefrom we shall be cleansed and 
free from the last imperfection which tor- 
mented us upon earth, from the last trace 
of our faults and our sins. This assurance, 
if we esteem it rightly, has in itself much 
consolation. It reminds us that one day, in 
God's good time, we shall be delivered from 
the soils and wounds which our transgres- 
sions have left upon our poor souls. 

To those who love and serve God, the 
thought of their unworthiness to meet the 
sight of the Most Holy and Most Pure, is 
a real and keen distress. Indeed, the con- 
viction of man's guilt in the sight of God, 
is part of the great heritage of human sor- 
row, and the effort to be cleansed of sin 
and the consequences of sin, is at the root 
of many practices of penance and atonement 
found among pagan and barbarous tribes. 
The weakness of our nature inclines us to 
trangress God's law, but once the sin is com- 
mitted, shame follows fast on its traces, and 
the unhappy sinner seeks for some means 
to purge his soul of the stain of his unhappy 



38 On Being Made Clean 

fault. It is thus common to all men who 
are not hardened in guilt or sophisticated 
by false theories, or who are not so ignorant 
as to be unable to comprehend their situation, 
to desire some means of being freed from 
their past sins. Hence the rituals of pen- 
ance and atonement, to be found in all 
religions; hence the austerities and mortifi- 
cations which are part of the universal lan- 
guage of piety; hence men are drawn to 
severe and difficult practices of purification, 
whereby they hope to be made clean from 
sin and the consequences of sin. 

Thus the means of penance and satisfac- 
tion which the Church offers her children in 
this world, are not only a necessity to our 
fallen and sinful state, they are also the 
answer to a craving of our nature. The 
desire to be clean of the consequences of 
our sin, which is so ingrained in us, and 
which has given rise to so many non-Chris- 
tian ceremonies of purification, is answered 
in a merciful and complete way by the sacra- 
ments, which offer to the sinner, no matter 
how deep and terrible his guilt, an oppor- 
tunity of being cleansed and healed of his 
transgressions, providing he be truly repent- 
ant. The craving to be clean from sin is a 



On Being Made Clean 39 

salutary desire, and so God has given to His 
Church the means to gratify it. 

Yet in the personal application of these 
means of cleansing to our own soul, there 
always remains a certain degree of obscurity. 
We are, unhappily, sure that we have sinned, 
as St. Augustine says, but we are not sure 
that our sins have been forgiven. Still less 
are we sure that our penances, the use of the 
sacramentals, the gaining of indulgences, 
have rid us of all the remains of sin, of all 
the punishment still due after the guilt has 
been forgiven, of all the lesser sins which 
we have not rightly repented of. These 
things may still soil and burden our soul, 
even after our serious sins have been for- 
given. When, then, shall we be certain of 
being completely friends of God? When 
shall we know that all traces of our sins 
have been banished from our soul? The 
answer is, "When we come forth from purga- 
tory." 

Whatever God does, is done well and 
thoroughly. Whenever He creates a thing 
for a special object, that object is attained. 
It is scarcely necessary for us to reason long 
to convince ourselves that since the state of 
purgatory has been created by God for the 



40 On Being Made Clean 

express purpose of cleansing our souls from 
all trace of sin, and making us utterly pure 
and ready for heaven, this purging of our 
spirits will be well and perfectly accom- 
plished. When we emerge from the fiery 
bath of purgatory we shall be quite clean 
and fit even for the eyes of God. There 
will be in us then no speck or stain of human 
sin. We shall literally be as pure as the 
angels, and the glory of our sanctifying 
grace, that gold of the spirit, that gift of 
God which makes us holy, will shine out with 
splendor, no longer obscured by the slightest 
stain. We shall be a worthy associate for 
the company of the Blessed, and the eyes of 
the angels and the saints, bent on us with 
intensest love and welcome, will discover in 
us nothing unfit for the pure light of heaven. 
If we can conceive even very faintly the joy 
of that ecstatic moment, when we shall look 
our own selves through and through and dis- 
cover in all our being no speck or stain, we 
may see what consolation is to be found in 
the thought of a purgatory. 

If there existed some marvelous process, 
discovered by modern medicine, for cleans- 
ing and rejuvenating the whole human sys- 
tem, washing out all the accumulations of 



On Being Made Clean 41 

disease, renewing all the organs of the body 
to the cleanness and vigor of youth, making 
the frame glow with health and strength and 
prolonging indefinitely the life of the body 
in the flush of well-being and physical per- 
fection, how eagerly the feeble, the diseased 
and the old, would throng to beg the favor of 
being treated and cleansed and healed. It 
would not matter to them that the treatment 
was painful and tedious, that it was costly 
and exacting — they would bear the pain for 
the sake of the future peace. The assured 
hope of seeing an end to all the infirmities 
and uncleannesses which vex them, would 
make them willing to submit to hard condi- 
tions and to bear agonizing pain. 

Purgatory is indeed such a cure for the 
uncleannesses and diseases of our nobler 
part, the soul. It rejuvenates, so to say, 
our spirit, jaded and old with the sins of 
this wretched life. It restores to us that 
innocence which was ours in the glorious 
youth of our soul, when we had been born 
again of water and the Holy Ghost and were 
without spot in the eyes of God and of His 
saints. It frees us forever from our spir- 
itual illnesses, themselves the results of our 
sins, and ushers us into a glorious existence 



42 On Being Made Clean 

in which sin will be impossible, wh&re we 
shall forever enjoy the fullest youth and life 
of the spirit, in a health and joy that knows 
no end. It is good to think that there is 
such a remedy for all our soul's evils, such 
a place of cleansing that can wash and burn 
from the very inner marrow of our soul all 
shameful and sickening stains. 

Again, one sees the willingness with which 
surgical patients submit to painful and dan- 
gerous operations to secure even a trifling 
prolongation of their life, even a brief 
respite from some terrible disease that is 
devouring them. They will agree to leave 
their homes and their occupations, to be cut 
and burned, to pass long hours of suffering, 
to risk their precious lives on a chance of 
being healed. They have no such absolute 
assurance as has the soul in purgatory, that 
they will be cleansed and healed. They 
have no certainty that the result of the treat- 
ment will be favorable in proportion as their 
sufferings are dolorous. Yet they put them- 
selves in the hands of the surgeon, they take 
the anaesthetic and bear the after conse- 
quences of an operation, thanking God that 
there are hospitals and operating rooms and 
men skilful enough to make the incisions in 



On Being Made Clean 43 

their bodies, which may give some health 
where before there was illness and corrup- 
tion. 

When we pass into the keeping of the 
angel of purgatory, there will be no doubt- 
fulness or speculation. With the sureness 
of a divine decree, our soul will be purged 
and cleansed of its last stain, made utterly 
healthy and pure and prepared for the bright 
wedding-feast of heaven. In that hospital 
of souls there is no uncertainty of a cure. 
We shall rest content, even in the anguish of 
purgatory, because we shall be so sure of our 
healing, so confident of our eternal vigor of 
body and soul forevermore. 

If we were not assured by faith of the 
existence of purgatory, and by reason, of its 
complete efficacy to cleanse our souls, we 
might be driven to worry and to wonder how 
such creatures as ourselves might ever be 
made fit for heaven. Nothing defiled can 
enter there, and which of us but is sure that 
he has not that spotless innocence that would 
entitle him to pass the portals of the God 
of infinite purity? True, by severe penance, 
by a rectitude of intention and holiness of 
life that would atone for our past transgres- 
sions and avoid all new occasions of soiling 



44 On Being Made Clean 

our souls by sin, we might hope to make our- 
selves so clean of spirit that we could go 
straight from our death-bed into eternal 
glory. But we can scarcely flatter ourselves 
that we are brave enough or strong enough 
for such a perfect self-purification. Most 
of us have an abiding conviction that when 
we have done with this life we shall need a 
period of cleansing in purgatory, for we are 
aware that we have not done enough in life 
to atone for all the punishment due to our 
sins. 

Purgatory is therefore our refuge and our 
hope of cleansing. What we cannot or will 
not do for ourselves in this life, God's mercy 
will do for us effectively in purgatory. It 
would be much better so to live as not to 
need those searching fires, just as it would 
be much better for men so to live as never 
to fall into the hands of physician or surgeon. 
But since we do fall ill and languish because 
of our sins, and have not ourselves the 
strength to overcome our weaknesses, it is a 
merciful thing that there waits for us at last 
an effective means to become clean and ready 
for God's banquet everlasting. 

There are many other consoling corol- 
laries from the doctrine of purgatory — more 



On Being Made Clean 45 

than there is space to tell. For one thing, 
this doctrine reminds us that we can by our 
good actions and our sufferings, borne in 
satisfaction of the justice of God, lessen 
more and more our purgatory and cleanse 
our soul more and more completely from the 
stains of sin. The more we do in this world 
by way of penance and atonement, the less 
will remain to be done when we are come 
to purgatory. Even the bearing of the 
trials and sorrows of every day for the love 
of God and in reparation for our offences, 
will lessen our time in purgatory. 

It is consoling, too, to remember that by 
the gaining of indulgences w r e can shorten, 
for ourselves and for others, the time of 
purifying. The means of gaining indul- 
gences are multiplied by the Church to 
encourage us thus to apply the merits of 
Christ for the satisfying of the temporal 
punishment due to our sins. Somehow or 
other the satisfaction must be made, and it 
rests with ourselves whether it shall for the 
most part be accomplished in this world, 
or deferred to the hard ordeal of purgatory. 
The woes of this world are brief and pass- 
ing. It will help us to bear them if we think 
that each of these temporal afflictions, duly 



4 6 



On Being Made Clean 



offered up in atonement for our* sins, is of 
immense efficacy in cleansing our souls. 

We shall understand all these things far 
better when we have done with the illusions 
of life, and entered into the portals of eter- 
nity. Then our poor soul, conscious for the 
first time of the hideousness of the stains of 
sin, and agonized by the desire of being made 
clean and fit for the sight of God, will cry 
out for the baths of purgatory. In his poem 
"The Dream of Gerontius," Cardinal New- 
man has voiced this desire in a moving lyric: 
"Take me away," cries out the soul, "and in 
the lowest deep, there let me be !" The poor 
souls in purgatory are most grateful to God 
for providing this cleansing fire wherein they 
are made pure of what now alone afflicts 
them — the traces of their sins. Though 
they suffer, yet they are consoled in the midst 
of their pain, for they know that every 
instant brings them nearer to the glory of 
heaven. 

So, if we look intently on the doctrine of 
purgatory, we, too, shall discern therein some 
comfort and consolation. Whether or not 
we have courage to cut away, ourselves, the 
rankness of the wounds of our souls, there 
is a cure hereafter that will make us utterly 



On Being Made Clean 47 

whole. Whether or not we leave this life 
quite free from all affection to venial sin, 
there is a place of purging that will detach 
us utterly from all that is not perfectly pleas- 
ing to God, and deliver us from our baser 
selves, our plague and our shame all our life 
long. We dread the approach of death 
because we feel ourselves so unworthy to 
appear before an all-holy God, from whom 
nothing is hidden, who searches the heart. 
But God has had pity on our misery and has 
provided for us an antechamber to heaven, 
where, like courtiers of a great prince, we 
may arrange our disordered vesture and 
make ourselves quite fit to appear before our 
Master and our King. This antechamber 
to heaven is the place or state of cleansing 
that we meaningly call "purgatory." 



THE CHEERING THOUGHT OF 
HEAVEN 

WE CHEAT ourselves of a consolation 
that could lighten up the whole 
path of our lives, when we neglect 
to think of and contemplate the everlasting 
joys of heaven. Once deeply grasped, the 
reality of that place of everlasting peace and 
glory and delight can cast a holy light upon 
all the dark places of our life. Not only is 
the attainment of heaven the consummation 
of our existence, the fulfilling of all our aspir- 
ations, the curing of all our woes and the 
realization of all our ideals and desires, but 
even the thought of heaven is a medicine for 
our wearinesses and sorrows, a balm for our 
wounds, a solace for our griefs and woes. 
To think rightly of heaven is to understand 
the world, to judge correctly of life, to esti- 
mate all things at their true worth, and to 
see our own course, its sorrows and its joys, 
in right perspective. 

Yet we are much more inclined to seek 
temporal and slight consolations from this 

4 8 



Cheering Thought of Heaven 49 

world and the things around us, than to look 
for solace from the thought of heaven. One 
reason for this is that our nature is prone 
to present and visible things and finds it diffi- 
cult to aspire to what is spiritual and unseen. 
While we believe firmly in the existence of 
heaven, yet this truth has not its due effect 
in consoling and strengthening our souls, 
because we make so little effort to realize the 
meaning of heaven. Immersed in the world 
of the senses, distracted by material things, 
we do not grasp the significance of what we 
firmly believe. 

In the Apostles' Creed we say : "I believe 
... in life everlasting." What an astound- 
ing profession of faith! We believe in a 
future life which is to be everlasting, that is, 
to have no end. Pause for a moment on 
the meaning of those words. We believe in 
a life which will begin when we enter heaven, 
but which will literally and in sober truth 
have no end. Forever and forever, through 
uncounted ages, past all imaginable years, 
we shall continue to live and to live, not this 
wretched and painful life of earth, with its 
thousand cares and sorrows, but a life 
wherein God Himself will exert, so to say, 
the powers of His Omnipotence to make us 



50 Cheering Thought of Heaven 

perfectly and supremely happy, where we 
shall at every instant be filled with bliss to 
the very measure of our capacity, where we 
shall share in the imperishable and glorious 
life of the City of the Heavenly Jerusalem, 
the abode of unending happiness and peace. 

Our faith is most firm in the existence of 
this life without end. We believe that death 
is not the end-all of our conscious existence, 
but only the term of our suffering and trial 
in this world. Our present life is but a pre- 
lude and a preparation. Here, we can 
scarcely be said to live, so miserable and 
restricted is our existence. Our lordly 
faculties are constrained by the conditions 
of matter; our days are few and full of 
trouble like the days of a hired soldier; we 
have not here a lasting city, but we look for 
the things that are to come. 

But in that everlasting life, how glorious 
shall be the expansion of our being! The 
intelligence, which now is darkened by sin, 
and limited by the narrow confines of human 
knowledge, will be so illumined by the Light 
of Glory, so strengthened and transformed 
by the power of God, that we shall be wiser 
than all the sages of earth, shall possess the 
most thrilling power of thought and be the 



Cheering Thought of Heaven 5 1 

fit associates of the celestial host in heavenly 
intelligence. Those who are sad at their 
own limited knowledge and vision, who 
regret their missed opportunities of educa- 
tion, may console themselves with the 
thought that if they love and serve God 
faithfully in this short life on earth, the 
power of the Most High will give to them, 
for all of their life everlasting, a depth and 
vigor of intelligence that will be the wonder 
of the Blessed. For our intelligence in the 
life to come will not be measured by our 
wisdom and education in this world, but by 
the fidelity with which we have loved God, 
kept His commandments and merited eternal 
glory. 

So, too, our will, perfected and confirmed 
in holiness forever by the beatific vision of 
God, will be incapable of the slightest sin. 
Strong in all manner of goodness, noble and 
holy to a degree of which we cannot now con- 
ceive ourselves capable, we shall be united 
to the adorable will of God by so sure and 
unbreakable a tie, that through all eternity 
we shall be unable to will the slightest thing 
apart from His infinite good pleasure. Here 
our will is free, and this freedom, the source 
of our merit, is also, alas ! the reason of our 



52 Cheering Thought of Heaven 

sins, because our wretched will so often 
freely departs from the all-holy Will of God. 
But in the life everlasting, it will no longer 
be possible for us to sin. We shall see God 
as He is, and the ravishing goodness of that 
adorable God will so transport and engross 
our will as to make us incapable of doing 
anything, willing anything save as God wills. 
We shall, so, be utterly safe from any sin 
or imperfection through all eternity, as sin- 
less as the Virgin Mother of God herself, 
as sinless as the Son of God ! What a con- 
solation to those who groan beneath the 
weight of their own imperfections, who long 
to be delivered from their sins! 

In a similar way, all the faculties of our 
being shall be exalted and glorified beyond 
conception. Our imagination, that excellent 
faculty which yet plagues and misleads so 
many of mankind, shaLl be purified and 
strengthened to be a docile and perfect ser- 
vant of the intelligence. Now, the great 
reaches of poetry may be obscure to us, our 
imagination cannot rise, perhaps, on a lofty 
wing and range from heaven to earth, from 
earth to heaven. But in heaven all men 
shall be poets, in the exalted sense that all 
shall have the keenest appreciation of true 



Cheering Thought of Heaven 53 

beauty. The Infinite Beauty who is God, 
will indeed fill all minds and hearts, but the 
lesser beauties of creation will be open to 
our appreciation as to no poet or sage who 
ever walked this world. 

What an existence is this, which waits 
beyond the door of death, much more near 
to us than we imagine, much more accessible 
to us than a dream. All the rosy fancies of 
poets, all their worlds of vision bright in the 
light that never was on land or sea, pale into 
darkness beside the thought of that heavenly 
country where God Himself is ever busy 
ensuring with sedulous care the perfect hap- 
piness of the guests and favored children of 
His eternity. When we were little we loved 
the tales of the kingdom of the fairies, where 
the light and beauty of fancy were lavished 
in impossible profusion. But heaven is 
much more than the fairy land of our child- 
hood — it is a place where the almighty Cre- 
ator of the universe has exerted the powers 
of His omnipotence to make glad the hearts 
of His children, and where the inexhaustible 
resources of His love shall forever be pre- 
paring new surprises of joy and glory 
throughout the endless days of a perfectly 
happy eternity. 



54 Cheering Thought of Heaven 

Consider, again, the company that will be 
ours for all ages. Excellent above all the 
other joys of heaven is the delight of the 
beatific vision, whereby in a wonderful way 
we shall see God face to face and know Him 
as He is. Now we see Him, as it were, in 
a glass, darkly, arriving at the knowledge of 
His infinite beauty and perfections from the 
teachings of faith and from the loveliness 
and the wonder of His creation. But then 
we shall behold His very Self, and in a 
manner that we cannot even conceive, shall 
be made inexpressibly happy, seeing Him as 
He is, the Uncreated Beauty, the boundless 
Glory, the Love and Tenderness most 
infinite, the Absolute Goodness for whom 
our whole being craves, the Center of all 
our great desires, the Goal of all our hopes, 
to possess whom is heaven, to lack whom is 
most bitter hell. Our entire life long we 
are hungering after happiness, and all our 
efforts, consciously or not, are bent on secur- 
ing felicity. In God our only lasting happi- 
ness is to be found. That most glorious 
Lord can perfectly satisfy even the endless 
cravings of our nature. We shall rest in the 
fullness of peace and joy if only we possess 
God. In heaven we shall possess Him 



Cheering Thought of Heaven 55 

utterly and in the most perfect manner pos- 
sible to us, for we shall be His chosen friends 
for all eternity and we shall see Him as 
He is. 

Think again of the angels and the saints 
who are to be our companions throughout 
an eternity of happiness. In the nine choirs 
of the celestial spirits, how many excellent 
and perfect friends wait to welcome us to 
their company. The angels and the arch- 
angels, the thrones, the dominations, the 
principalities and powers, the virtues, cher- 
ubim, seraphim — we know but the names of 
these glorious hierarchies and can conjecture 
only in part the majestic offices which they 
fulfil in the Court of God. But in each of 
these exalted choirs of angels are innumer- 
able bright spirits, beautiful beyond our 
farthest conceiving, various in gifts, lovely 
in nature, reflecting each one the perfections 
of the Divine Essence, so that the company 
of each will be to us a special and particular 
joy for all eternity. How happy will be our 
converse with the blessed angels ! 

All these angelic natures wait to receive 
us into their companionship with a friendly 
joy that we cannot dream of. We are cre- 
ated to supply those gaps in their ranks that 



56 Cheering Thought of Heaven 

were made by the fall of so many spirits from 
the gates of heaven into the depths of hell, 
when God tried His angels to see whether 
they would obey Him. The angels in 
heaven must therefore regard us with a spe- 
cial and brotherly love, seeing in us the 
future companions of their endless life, the 
sharers in that eternal paean of love and joy 
wherewith they praise forever the God who 
made them. What a welcome we shall 
receive then from those lovable and glorious 
spirits when we come to join the choirs of 
their celestial bliss ! 

Next turn your eyes on the ranks of the 
saints, and see with how noble and goodly 
a human company, by the mercy and kind- 
ness of God, you are to spend your joyous 
eternity. See the Sacred Humanity of our 
Divine Saviour, the Eldest Brother of the 
elect, the Lamb of God, who has taken away 
the sins of the world. He is the Light of 
the New Jerusalem, the Joy of all His peo- 
ple, whom He has gathered together at last 
from the darkness of the world into the 
security and light and peace of the home He 
has prepared for them from all eternity. 
How can we imagine the glory of that risen 
Humanity, bright with the jewels of His 



Cheering Thought of Heaven 57 

sacred Blood, splendid with the light of His 
rosy wounds, which He keeps throughout all 
the ages in memory of His saving passion, 
beautiful beyond even the beauty of the 
Blessed, whom to see and to adore will be 
one of the crowning blisses of paradise ! 

Try to conceive what it will mean to those 
who have loved Him so long unseen, who 
have served Him faithfully, according to 
their lights, in the obscure and difficult paths 
of this world, who' have tried to follow Him 
from afar through the mists of life, to see 
Him face to face and exult in the sweetness 
of His welcoming smile in the safe home of 
eternity! Think of the converse we shall 
hold with that gentle Lord, in whose Hands 
and Feet and Side are written indelibly the 
proofs of His boundless love for each one of 
us, who has been waiting, during all the years 
of our life, with holy impatience for the 
moment when He could welcome us to 
heaven. How much He has to say to us, 
which will have to wait for that glorious 
hour because now He has imposed on Him- 
self the silence of the tabernacle, the reserve 
that befits Him during our time of probation. 
But there will come a time when He will give 
full way to the torrents of holy tenderness 



58 Cheering Thought of Heaven 

which His Sacred Heart has for each one of 
us. That time will be the day of our endless 
converse with Him in heaven. 

Turn in pious contemplation and look upon 
our Blessed Mother, who likewise waits with 
holy longing to see us, her own children, safe 
in the shelter of her mantle in heaven. What 
manner of pure joy will be ours, when with 
exulting eyes we look for the first time on 
the true lineaments of that Most Beloved 
of women whom we have so loved during all 
our time on earth ! We have seen innumer- 
able pictures of the Blessed Mother, and 
some of them were the glorious imaginings 
of great geniuses of art, but none of them 
has quite satisfied our filial devotion because 
none of them was beautiful enough fitly to 
represent the most lovely and most holy of 
all the daughters of Eve. But in heaven we 
shall look for all eternity upon the very 
countenance of our Mother, and shall know 
that her smile holds for us in particular all 
the fondness of a mother's love. 

It has been the delight of some of the 
most favored of the saints to have the privi- 
lege of a vision of the Mother of God, and 
one moment of that blissful contemplation 
would have been enough to lighten the 



Cheering Thought of Heaven 59 

whole pathway of their after lives. We 
shall all have in heaven, not merely the 
privilege of a single vision, but the constant 
companionship of her whom, after our 
Blessed Lord, we love the best of all 
creation. It is impossible for us to realize 
the felicity which this one joy of heaven will 
bring us. One look, one word from Blessed 
Mary would fill us with delight. How often, 
how long she will speak to us throughout the 
bright day of eternity ! 

When we think of the company of the 
saints in heaven, words fail to describe their 
number or the variety of their happy com- 
panies. There await us, in countless throngs, 
the ranks of the patriarchs and prophets, all 
the souls who were saved within and without 
the law before the coming of Our Lord upon 
earth. His apostles and disciples and all the 
faithful and chosen souls of that day who 
saw and heard the Word Made Flesh during 
the time of His ministry upon earth, await 
us in heaven. The glorious throng of martyrs 
await us, too, their robes all shining, washed 
in the blood of the Lamb; the throngs of 
confessors, the choir of virgins, the saints 
of all ages, from the first soul which entered 
heaven after Our Lord's ascension, to the 



60 Cheering Thought of Heaven 

latest come forth from purgatory, all this 
shining company will welcome us to converse 
everlasting. Many of our own friends and 
relations are there, expecting us with a joyful 
eagerness of desire, and it will be part of 
our everlasting joy to see reflected in their 
eyes the splendors of our own beatitude. 

All this, and much more that we can 
faintly discern concerning that place of our 
eternal glory, is not a happy dream; it is a 
fact as literal and real as this present life, 
indeed more real and more enduring, for the 
City of God, the New Jerusalem is to last, 
unchanged, forever. At this very instant the 
angels and the blessed inhabit those gracious 
mansions which are ours for the desiring, and 
our own place is ready the moment after our 
death when we shall be freed from the stains 
of sin, either by our own prayer and penance 
or by virtue of the purifying flames of purga- 
tory. "In My Father's house," said Our 
Lord, "there are many mansions." One of 
those eternal and blessed abodes is already 
waiting to be ours for all eternity. 

As we realize more the ecstatic happiness 
of heaven, we shall take more consolation 
from that thought for all the sorrows and 
trials of the world. The more we grow to 



Cheering Thought of Heaven 61 

esteem and to love the joys hereafter, the less 
we shall crave for and regret the pleasures 
of this life. The thought of heaven is thus 
at the same time a remedy and a consolation 
for our griefs and afflictions, and an antidote 
against that worldliness, that too-great love 
of this life and its perishable goods, which 
is a danger of these comfortable and pleasure- 
seeking times. 

As our Christian faith assures us of the 
existence of heaven, so also does Christian 
hope encourage us to look forward with a 
firm expectation to enjoy one day all its 
ineffable delights. True, if we considered 
only our own weakness and wickedness, we 
might grow discouraged at the thought of 
the straight and narrow way in which we 
must walk toward heaven. But we must not 
rely on our own resources. There is One 
who strengthens us and by the assistance of 
His grace, given to us in abundance in His 
good time, we firmly hope to win some day 
the joys of heaven. This firm hope grounded 
in Christ and relying on His holy promises, 
will not be disappointed. 

As men who are on hard service in foreign 
lands keep with them the picture of their 
home, and console themselves during weary 



62 Cheering Thought of Heaven 

and dangerous hours by thinking of the joyful 
return that will be theirs after so much 
loneliness and toil, so may we, exiles from 
our true country of heaven, lighten the 
miseries of our lot by thinking of the bright 
home-coming and eternal joy that will be 
ours at last. The reality, when by God's 
grace we attain to it, will surpass all our most 
golden dreams, for we are incapable even of 
imagining the joys of heaven. Eye hath not 
seen nor ear heard nor hath it entered into 
the mind of man to conceive the joy that 
God has prepared for those who love Him. 
What matter, then, if the way be dark or 
the paths rude that lead to such a country 
of peace and of 4 delight? What matter that 
our brief days on earth are full of toil and 
trouble, if so calm and happy an existence 
awaits us beyond the tomb? We can bear 
our trials lightly and offer up willingly our 
sorrows and labors to the Lord, if we 
remember always with St. Paul that we have 
not here a lasting city, but we look for that 
which is to come. 



CONFORMITY 

THE virtue of conformity to God's will, 
by which we are inclined always to 
wish what God wishes, to be satisfied 
with what He decrees, to regulate our wills 
by the infinitely holy and wise desires of our 
Father in heaven, is a sublime means of 
growing in merit and holiness. It is likewise 
a singular aid to contentment and happiness, 
and a source of constant consolation. If we 
will whatever God wills, we are sure always 
to have all we wish, to suffer nothing that 
we do not wish to suffer, to enjoy whatever 
we desire, to be filled with all the good things 
we long for, because we shall wish, desire, 
long for nothing but the accomplishment of 
God's will in us and in all other men; and 
this most holy and mighty will of God is sure 
to be accomplished, most perfectly and com- 
pletely, in ourselves and in every mortal, now 
and to the end of time. By conforming our 
wills to the will of God, we, therefore, par- 
take in some sense in His assured peace and 

63 



64 Conformity 

infinite power. We anchor our shifting and 
changeable will, so prone to drift astray, to 
the changeless, mighty, unerring will of the 
Infinite. 

All our uneasiness and disquiet come from 
a want of conformity of our will with the will 
of God. Our anxieties and questionings, 
our regrets and anticipations, would be dis- 
pelled did we but rest tranquilly in the will 
of God. Our own will is like a tiny skiff on 
a rough ocean, perilously tossed from crest 
to crest of angry waves, but when we mount 
upon the will of God, we are borne onward 
with even and resistless motion, for the puny 
tempests of human circumstance have no 
power to shake the infinite might of the 
Master of the Universe. 

We shall be wise to strive and to pray for 
this extraordinary virtue of conformity, 
which makes us, in a sense, sharers no less 
in the peace than in the power of the Most 
High. Serious thought about the reason- 
ableness and blessedness of conformity to the 
will of God, will likewise aid us in acquiring 
it. There is an indulgenced prayer of the 
Church, which suggests in short compass 
some moving thoughts concerning the most 
holy will of God. 



Conformity 6$ 

"May the most high, most just, and most 
amiable will of God," it says, u be done, 
praised and exalted above all things for- 
ever!" Repeating these significant words* 
reflecting about their meaning, will carry us 
far along the way of conformity to the will 
of God. 

The most high will of God! The more 
we meditate on the heights and depths of 
God's will, the more we shall be over- 
whelmed with the sense of God's greatness 
and our own littleness. There is no propor- 
tion between God and ourselves. He is 
infinite greatness, we endlessly little; He is 
all-wisdom, we are foolish and short of 
vision. It is of the nature of God to be all- 
perfect and all-holy; we, in our finite 
natures, are most imperfect, limited and 
wretched. What we know of God is indeed 
true, so far as it goes, but our knowledge is, 
like ourselves, very limited and imperfect. 
There are in God endless heights beyond the 
heights that we know, and depths beyond the 
depths we can comprehend. 

The will of God, therefore, is lofty beyond 
our comprehending. It is above all His 
works and reaches even from end to end of 
the universe. There is no detail of all His 



66 Conformity 

myriad creation, no atom of the earth, no 
dust of the stars, but the most high will of 
God directs, overrules, and guides it to His 
own purpose, to the accomplishment of His 
designs, to the working out of His eternal 
glory. Could we comprehend the meaning 
of the will of God, its holiness, its beauty 
and power, the sureness of its accomplish- 
ment, the great ends to which it moves with 
unerring precision and irresistible might, 
how fervently we should pronounce these 
words of the indulgenced prayer : "May the 
most high . . . will of God be done, praised 
and glorified forever I" 

"The most just will of God." Again, 
could we but realize the justice of God's will, 
we should be filled with an insatiable thirst 
and hunger for its accomplishment. God is 
essential justice. With us poor mortals, 
justice is a quality which we may either 
possess or lack, without ceasing to be human. 
But in what concerns the attributes of God, 
all is infinite, necessary, eternal. Hence, in 
God is essential justice, which cannot fail. 
If, by an absurd supposition, God were not 
infinite justice, He would not be God. From 
this truth, which we learned when we studied 
the catechism, it follows necessarily that 



Conformity 67 

each provision of God's will must be infi- 
nitely just and holy. "Thou art just, O 
Lord," exclaims the Holy Scripture, "and 
Thy judgments are right." Whether or no 
we can discern the justice of God's will, we 
are certain, both by reason and by faith, that 
an infinite equity governs all His decrees. 
The fault is not with the all-holy will of God, 
if some of His judgments seem to us difficult 
to understand, but with our own limited and 
imperfect apprehension. Whether we see it 
or not, the justice of God's will is without 
measure and without bounds. Knowing that 
God is all goodness, all wisdom and all jus- 
tice, we are sure that His holy will is in all 
things infinitely good and just. 

We sometimes come to have for a man 
so perfect a confidence in his equity and 
honor, that no matter what he does, we are 
persuaded beforehand that it must be honor- 
able and right. Our faith in his integrity 
is so great, that it outweighs all suspicions, 
ill-appearances, semblances of wrong that 
may rise up against him. In proportion as 
our trust is absolute, our conviction is strong 
that he will do no injustice, and when sus- 
picions arise in us or accusations are brought 
by others, we wave them aside with the 



68 Conformity 

thought: "He is too honorable and good 
to do anything that is not just." 

If this confidence of ours were multiplied 
a million times, it would not approach the 
confidence which we ought to have in the jus- 
tice of God. Even with the most upright 
of men, honor and justice are no part of his 
nature. It is still possible for him to err 
from justice ; there is no essential contradic- 
tion in thinking of him as otherwise than 
just. But with God, to be infinite justice is 
a part of His being. It is as impossible for 
Him to be other than just, as it is for light 
to be darkness, for heat to be cold, for gold 
to be clay. Hence, no matter how appear- 
ances may puzzle us, no matter how the 
shortness of our own apprehension may con- 
fuse us in estimating the significance of 
human events, we must always be entirely 
sure that God's will is justice itself. It 
would be easier for heaven and earth to pass 
away than for God's will to fall short of 
infinite justice by so much as the measure 
of a hair. 

Whatever, therefore, God wills to allow 
in our lives, it is infinitely just for Him to 
allow it. Whatever He sends, it is most 
just for Him to send it; whatever He decrees 



Conformity 69 

it is infinitely just for Him to decree it. We 
conclude the justice of men from their 
actions. If a man is just in his acts, we say- 
he is a just man. With God we must act 
otherwise. Since He is essential and infinite 
justice, and we know this beforehand by 
reason and by Faith, we must reverse the 
manner of our judgments and say, u God 
wills this, therefore it is just." 

If we are ever tempted to question any 
one of God's decrees, there is no need for 
us to reason concerning the fact itself which 
has stirred up our questionings. We need 
only look up into the heavens and remember 
that it is of the very essence of God to be 
infinite justice. "Doubt thou the stars are 
fire; doubt that the sun doth move; doubt 
truth to be a liar; but never doubt I love," 
says Hamlet in the play, protesting his fidel- 
ity. But to assure ourselves of the eternal 
and infinite justice of even the least of God's 
decrees, we might heap together all the 
antitheses of the universe. It is impossible 
that God should be, in anything whatsoever, 
any less than infinitely just. "May the most 
just will of God be done, praised, and glori- 
fied forever!" 

God's will, the prayer likewise reminds us, 



70 Conformity 

is not only most high and most just; it is also 
infinitely lovable. "The most amiable will of 
God!" This, too, is a thought we much 
need to dwell on. It is sometimes easier for 
us to realize that God's will is infinitely high 
and just than to bring home to ourselves that 
it is also infinitely lovable, endlessly deserv- 
ing to be loved. It is not enough for us to 
be resigned to the will of God because it is 
right and good. We should also arouse in 
our hearts a burning love for that most ami* 
able will." 

We can persuade ourselves, both by reason 
and by faith, of the amiableness of the will 
of God, yet it is perhaps by making acts of 
love of the will of God that we shall more 
surely come to the realization of its infinite 
lovableness. There is, alas! a great gulf 
between knowing and believing that God's 
will is endlessly to be loved, and actually 
loving that holy will as it deserves. "The 
heart has its reasons which the reason can 
scarcely understand." By setting our heart 
aflame with love for God's holy will, we more 
speedily arrive at the practical conviction of 
its infinite lovableness. 

Here again we must steer our course by 
reason and faith, and not suffer the little per- 



Conformity 71 

plexities and troubles of the moment to 
obscure our mind's and our heart's vision. 
God's thoughts are not our thoughts nor are 
His ways our ways. We see but a small 
fragment of life, and see it very imperfectly. 
God sees the whole great round and discerns 
and comprehends it most completely. No 
wonder, then, that we cannot always perceive 
the lovableness of God's will in its particular 
dispensations, because we are too ignorant 
and too poorly equipped with judgment, to 
appreciate the vast and lovable ends which 
God has in all His works. 

In proportion as our love for God is great 
and strong, we shall find it more and more 
easy to love whatever His holy will ordains. 
"I know," said St. Francis de Sales, "that 
whatever is, is the work of God, and I love 
whatever God does." With the conviction 
that all things are the expression of the will 
of God, and that His will is infinitely to be 
loved, should come likewise a great love of 
all things for the sake of God. One only 
thing must we detest and abhor, as God does, 
and this thing is sin. Sin alone, of all things 
in the universe, is not the work of God, but 
even out of sin God's will draws His own 
greater glory and the good of those who love 



72 Conformity 

Him. It will be one of the ecstatic surprises 
of our eternity, to see how God has made 
even the sins of men work for His glory and 
for the accomplishment of His plans for 
those who love and serve Him. Even in this 
world we sometimes obtain amazing glimpses 
of the manner in which God's will makes use 
of all things to bring about His great designs. 
Yet here we can see but a tiny part of His 
holy purposes. Now, we must believe and 
trust and love; hereafter, we shall behold 
and rejoice and praise. 

This interesting prayer concludes with the 
petition that God's will may not only be done, 
but also praised and exalted above all things, 
forever. It is a most reasonable petition, 
and one which is sure in one way or another 
to gain accomplishment. Willingly or 
unwillingly, to their eternal honor or their 
eternal shame, here or hereafter, all God's 
reasonable creatures must praise and exalt 
above all things His most just, most high 
and most amiable will. Those who, in this 
time of probation which we call life, are sin- 
cerely desirous to do, praise and exalt the 
will of God, become His friends and 
familiars and merit hereafter eternal glory. 
Those who refuse to conform their free wills 



Conformity 73 

to the will of God in this life, shall acknowl- 
edge and glorify His will at the judgment 
day and fulfil that holy will in their own 
punishment. But, willingly or unwillingly, 
here or hereafter all reasonable beings shall 
own and accomplish God's most holy will. 

By making acts of the love of God's will, 
and taking care betimes to join our will to 
His, we may assure for ourselves a glorious 
conformity to His designs in this life and in 
the next. Our great nobleness and the dig- 
nity of our nature consist, indeed, in this, 
that we can freely love, fulfil and exalt the 
most high and just and amiable will of God. 

The will of God manifests itself to us in 
many ways. The voice of our conscience 
declares to us that holy will and bids us order 
our daily lives according to the dictates of 
right reason and of faith. The events of our 
days disclose to us what God has ordained or 
permitted, to give us opportunities of merit. 
The directions of those who have authority 
from God to counsel or command us, are 
very clear showings forth of His will in 
regard to our activities and occupations. 
Even public events and the great course of 
history indicate to us in what manner God 
wills to exercise His elect and through what 



74 Conformity 

trials and successes He means to work out 
the salvation of mankind. 

If we regard the world and our own life 
with the eyes of faith, our days become a 
procession of messengers from God, declar- 
ing, each one in its turn, the biddings of His 
holy will. Joys and sorrows, successes and 
failures, good days and evil, the countenance 
of friends and the resistance of enemies, what 
are they all but messengers of the will of 
God? If we lose sight of their meaning and 
their message, if we grow blind to the light 
of faith and attend only to the plausible but 
false wisdom of this world, we shall miss 
many an opportunity of merit here and glory 
afterwards, many a precious chance to love 
and serve God and to give Him some small 
return for the inestimable riches of His 
providence. 

If we clear our inward vision by thought 
and prayer, conform our wills to the most 
excellent will of God, direct our intention by 
what we know of His, then we shall profit 
alike by the sun and the shadows of life, by 
its rude places and its smoother ways, for all 
things will serve to bring us forever nearer 
to the most blessed God. It will become our 
delight to accomplish, exalt and praise the 



Conformity 75 

will of God, most excellent, most wise, most 
lovable, most sure to be accomplished, most 
beneficent and holy. The prayer of our life 
on earth will be this, which also will be the 
paean of our rejoicing in eternity: "May the 
most high, most just, and most amiable will 
of God be done, praised and exalted above 
all things forever!" 



GOD'S CONDESCENSION 

IT IS Pentecost Sunday. I have said, this 
morning, the Mass of the Holy Ghost 
and the first part of His Office. "Come, 
Holy Spirit," sighs the Church during these 
divine mysteries, "fill the hearts of Thy 
faithful and kindle in them the fire of Thy 
divine love. Send forth Thy spirit and they 
shall be created and Thou shalt renew the 
face of the earth." Each feast of the Church 
has, so to speak, its own soul, its central truth 
and leading inspiration. Every feast as it 
comes, brings also some message to our indi- 
vidual self, some bit of sweetness, some 
striking thought which is the light of the 
mystery reflected upon the waters of our 
heart. Upon this Pentecost morning there 
comes to one some realization of the small 
tendernesses, the little condescensions of 
Almighty God. 

The Holy Spirit is called by the Scriptures 
and by the Fathers of the Church the Finger 
of God. It is He, according to our manner 

76 



God's Condescension 77 

of speaking, who works the wonders of grace 
and brings about the sanctification of souls. 
Of course, the actions of God are all common 
to all of the Divine Persons, but we attribute 
this or that work of the Divinity to one or 
the other, to the Father, the Son or the Holy 
Spirit, according as the action itself seems 
to us to be more closely connected with His 
personal characteristics. Since the Holy 
Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, 
is their mutual love, and is called in Holy 
Scripture the Goodness of God, the Charity 
of God, we attribute to Him the workings of 
divine grace in the souls of men. 

To those who have meditated on the 
nature of God, and have been able to con- 
ceive, in some dim way at least, of His 
boundless dignity, unspeakable holiness and 
limitless perfection, there is a breathless 
wonder in the thought of God's amazing 
condescension in dealing with His world. 
Indeed, so astonishing and beyond our 
unaided reason to conjecture, is the gracious- 
ness of the Most High toward His creatures, 
that it altogether escaped even the keenest 
intellects of old. While paganism thralled 
the ancient world, some keen intellects did 
discern that God is one, that there is one 



78 God's Condescension 

great Creator of the Universe who has laid 
down the laws that govern His Creation. 
But they could not achieve the truth, even 
in their most subtle musings, that the 
Almighty is all-merciful too, and loves with 
an infinite and condescending love each one 
of His human creatures. It needed the 
revelation of God Himself to convince us 
how intimate are His dealings with our 
souls. 

We are, though we may seem important 
to ourselves, in reality most insignificant 
compared to the vast scheme of God's uni- 
verse. Match yourself, as the meditation 
of the Spiritual Exercises suggests, with the 
great crowd of people who live in your own 
state, or even city. What are you among 
so many? Imagine, if you can, the multi- 
tudes who live in this whole nation, in other 
countries, in the entire world. Fourteen 
hundred millions of human souls inhabit the 
earth at this instant, yet what is that bound- 
less crowd, compared to the generations that 
have gone. What are they all, compared 
to the angels of heaven? And what are all 
these to God? Now return upon yourself, 
tiny detail that you are in this huge pano- 
rama of creation, and think what part of 



God's Condescension 79 

God's care and thought you can demand as 
of your own good right ! 

Yet the Holy Spirit deals with your soul 
as though there were no other in the world. 
He speaks to you, assists you in your efforts 
in His service, nourishes your supernatural 
life, is busy with you, during all your con- 
scious hours, enlightening, strengthening, 
consoling. The name by which we call His 
condescending and merciful aid for the per- 
formance of good and the avoidance of evil, 
is actual grace, the supernatural help of the 
Holy Ghost which aids us to perform good 
actions. The Holy Scriptures, which are 
God's authentic message to mankind, and 
which are supplemented and explained by the 
authentic teachings of His Church, speak 
much of the workings of the Holy Spirit in 
the souls of men. They reveal what we 
should otherwise never have known without 
God's teaching, the constant care with which 
the Most High cherishes, nourishes and sup- 
ports our supernatural life. They show us 
the Holy Spirit, whose nature is so infinitely 
above our own, who is the very God of 
heaven and earth, the all-blessed, the all- 
sufficient, dwelling in the holy company of 
the Father and the Son, Himself His own 



8o God's Condescension 

heaven and the delight of all the just, yet 
intimately and continually concerned with 
the slightest motions of our poor hearts. 
They reveal to us with what condescension 
beyond all comprehending this merciful Lord 
deals with us, enlightens our mind, moves our 
will, is ever ready with the strong aid with- 
out which we can do nothing meritorious of 
heaven, nothing worthy of our eternal 
destiny. 

Holy Scripture speaks in particular of the 
Holy Spirit as giving light to our minds and 
strength and fire to our hearts. His divine 
aid is brought to us through those two lordly 
faculties which are the highest in our nature, 
our intelligence, with which we conceive the 
truth, and our will, whereby we choose and 
resolve and thus shape our destiny here and 
hereafter. It is the effect of the grace of 
the Holy Spirit to enlighten our minds to 
see the way of justice, so that we may discern 
our duty and know the will of God, and to 
warm and fire our wills so that they may be 
energetic, courageous and firm in doing 
God's will and in serving and loving Him. 

Who has not experienced, who does not 
constantly experience, these illuminations of 
the mind and flamings of the will which are 



God's Condescension 81 

the work of the Holy Spirit in the soul? 
You are reading some good book, it may be 
that you have read it several times, but the 
message conveyed by a certain paragraph 
never impressed you very forcibly. Then, 
on a sudden, the passage glows and burns 
with a new meaning. The truth, which had 
so often passed, half understood, through 
your mind, now blazes out and brands itself 
on your consciousness with an intense reali- 
zation. At the same time your heart, which 
had before been cold and unresponsive to 
the message of this truth, leaps and pulses 
with new fervor and resolution. Aided by 
the inspiration of the Holy Spirit (for it 
is His touch on the mind and the soul that 
works these wonders), you make sacrifices, 
achieve heights of prayer, love of God and 
self-denial, that would have been entirely 
beyond your reach but for the help of the 
grace of the Holy Ghost. 

Even when we do not advert to the effects 
of His blessed influence, the Holy Spirit is 
still busy with us, whispering to our heart, 
illuminating our dull mind with heavenly 
realizations, teaching us new ways of serving 
God, reminding us of the faults that we 
should amend, planting in us the seeds of 



82 God's Condescension 

needed virtues. As though there were in 
His entire creation no other object of His 
solicitude and love, this Infinite Being, this 
personal Love, this unwearying Comforter, 
deals with our dull mind and perverse heart 
with utter affection, patience undismayed, 
untiring care. 

The thought of God's immense and con- 
stant condescension in giving us the inspira- 
tions of His grace, should stir our souls to 
an answering loyalty, a zeal for His love 
and service that will carry us out of our- 
selves. How unresponsive we have been to 
His inspirations, and yet the quiet voices of 
the pleading of His grace have never ceased. 
How undutiful we have been to the sugges- 
tions of His guidance, still, hour by hour He 
points out to us new opportunities of holi- 
ness. The patience of the Holy Spirit in 
renewing the offer of His help after we have 
rejected His grace for the thousandth time, 
is one of the wonders of the benignity of 
God. If anyone had treated our suggestions 
and offers of assistance as we have treated 
those of the Most High, we should long ago 
have ceased utterly to try to help him. Yet 
the Holy Spirit never grows weary. He 



God's Condescension 83 

pursues us with the gentle pleadings of His 
grace until we die. 

Ah, the immense mystery of God's con- 
descension toward men, and of man's incom- 
prehensible ingratitude ! Consider the state 
of the whole world to-day. Let your fancy 
roam again over the earth, seeing the count- 
less multitudes of men and women, in cities 
and country places, in this land and in coun- 
tries far away. In the heart and soul of 
every one of that inconceivably great swarm 
of human creatures, the Holy Spirit is inti- 
mately busy, moving the dull hearts to the 
love of God, inclining the darkened intelli- 
gences to comprehend His commandments 
and to see the duty that lies before them. 
There is no one of all the reasonable 
beings in the world, to whom this Infinite 
Love and Wisdom does not offer the guid- 
ance of His grace, the help of His power. 
Yet, think how His advances are scorned, 
His grace wasted and refused, the eternal 
allurements of His heavenly kingdom 
rejected and repelled for mean and fickle 
pleasures and for the good things of this 
perishable world. 

But many of the swarming millions to 
whom God's condescension is shown in vain, 



84 God's Condescension 

think nothing of the Holy Ghost and in no 
way realize what heavenly kindness is at 
work in their hearts and minds. Like the 
Jews of old they know not what they do 
when they are deaf to grace, refuse to be 
guided by the Holy Spirit, and neglect the 
whispers of God in their hearts for the loud, 
strident call of the flesh and the world. We 
ourselves who are instructed in the ways of 
God, it is we who are most inexcusable for 
neglecting His holy inspirations. We should 
treasure the good thoughts that come to us, 
the motions of love of God, of charity to 
our neighbor, of zeal for the welfare of the 
Church, that flame up in our will. For it 
is thus that the Spirit of God, the Comforter, 
condescends to address us, to help us, to urge 
us on toward heaven. If the smile of a 
great man, his encouraging word, the sugges- 
tions he makes for our welfare, move us in 
response, to energy and gratefulness, how 
we should start up and labor to correspond 
with the motions of God in our hearts. For 
a greater than man is here, encouraging us, 
admonishing, consoling. 

We should be filled also with a vast desire 
to make amends to the Holy Spirit by our 
own swift and generous answer to His 



God's Condescension 85 

promptings, for the many who refuse His 
grace and ignore the suggestions of His voice 
in their hearts. Loving the Infinite Love 
we should be eager to show our appreciation 
for His amazing condescension by the readi- 
ness of our obedience to the motions of His 
grace within us. If we prize as we should 
the awful privilege of having the Spirit of 
God in us, a privilege given to those who are 
children of God and heirs of heaven, we will 
listen for the first whispers of divine grace, 
now prompting us to love God more, now 
warning us against the growth of an evil 
habit, now suggesting some present good 
deed. By listening and obeying promptly 
our spiritual hearing becomes keener. We 
grow thus more docile and pliable to the 
leading of the Holy Ghost. 

If God could be sad, surely His divine 
goodness would be afflicted by the hardness 
of the hearts of men to His grace. The 
world, which would become an earthly para- 
dise if it were obedient to Him, is made a 
valley of tears by the disregard of men for 
the voice of God in their hearts. Let us 
very pointedly determine that at any cost 
we at least will revere and follow the breath- 



86 God's Condescension 

ings of the Holy Spirit. Let it not be in 
vain that the Most High so often leans down 
to us from the height of His glory and con- 
descends so constantly to whisper to our 
minds and fire our hearts. 



THE RICHNESS OF OUR HERITAGE 

Perhaps we have sometimes been prone 
to envy, because of the greatness of 
their graces and the fervor of their 
early faith, those primitive Christians who 
received the teaching of the apostles them- 
selves and lived in the warmth and splendor 
of the rising of the Son of Justice, before 
the charity of men had grown cold. They 
are indeed to be envied, those first-fruits of 
Christ's Church. With them the crown of 
martyrdom was so ordinary a blessing, that 
they did not mark the tombs of the martyrs 
in the catacombs with any special sign during 
those first years of persecution — it was too 
common and usual a lot to call for special 
distinction! Great graces flowed freely in 
the infant Church, and our Blessed Lord, 
newly come into His kingdom, showered 
down favors with a royal hand. 

But we of these latter ages of the Church 
have consolations and riches of our own, 
which even the early Christians did not pos- 
sess in such abundance. We are heirs to the 

87 



88 The Richness of Our Heritage 

accumulated thought, fervor and devotion of 
all the Christian centuries. Every epoch of 
history has added to the richness of our 
heritage. If we would but count over the 
treasures of devotion, example, teaching, 
which the years have hoarded up for the 
Church of this day, we should be carried 
away with gratitude. During nineteen cen- 
turies the Holy Ghost has labored in the 
midst of His people, to raise up saints, whose 
teaching still remains to us, to inspire great 
devotions whose fire still enkindles us, to 
prepare glorious episodes in the history of 
the Church, of which the memory still 
inspires us, to give to the faithful those sac- 
ramentals and means of grace which are now 
and ever ready at our hand. 

All these things, priceless and various, 
belong to us because we are of the body of 
the living Church whose Head is Christ. 
This living Church, unchanging through the 
ages, carries down through the years the 
unbroken tradition, entire and unalloyed, of 
the teaching of the Saviour of the World, 
and this teaching is itself the core and center 
of our heritage. His Faith and His sacra- 
ments we inherit as of right, when we become 
members of His Church through Baptism. 



The Richness of Our Heritage 89 

But around the teachings of the Faith, and 
beside the sacraments, like the tracery that 
clings to the mighty capitals and soaring 
arches of a Gothic cathedral, have accumu- 
lated rich deposits of thought, devotion, his- 
tory, which are likewise our own, our herit- 
age, because we are of the living Church of 
God. That self-same Church, identical and 
individual, has been present at and presided 
over every phase of the world's history since 
the Christian era began. She is herself, 
indeed, the prime actor and central figure of 
all Christian history. She possesses, there- 
fore, and gathers to herself all the Christian 
tradition, and gives it to her children. 

While other societies are born of the 
world and doomed to a precarious existence 
at the will of men, the Church is assured of 
a life breathed from the lips of Christ and 
promised by Him to endure forever. Like 
a careful mother, therefore, she gives to each 
generation of Catholics the fruits of devo- 
tion, thought, grace, prayer, experience, 
example, inspiration, which she has gleaned 
from the years gone by. "I was there," she 
can say, pointing to the vanished centuries, 
"and gathered these things for you; I am 
here, and bring them to you. The heritage 



90 The Richness of Our Heritage 

which you likewise leave for your brethren 
still to come, I shall also keep in my bosom 
and shall give to the generations yet unborn." 
Count over, if you can, the rich items of 
that inheritance. Look first of all at Cath- 
olic history, with its examples of heroism, 
wisdom, sanctity, and all Christian virtues. 
Speaking of the education of clerics in the 
sixth century, a learned writer remarks that 
they were not obliged, like those of the 
present day, to study the history of the 
Church for nineteen centuries, for the very 
simple reason that the history of the Church 
in those days ended with the sixth century! 
The remark brings home to us how much 
we possess of inspiring example and heroic 
story which the Catholics of that day did not 
have because the events had not yet come to 
pass. The lives of the saints beyond that 
day were not yet acted, much less written. 
The great course of God's providence in the 
life of the Church after them could not be 
traced and glorified, because it had not yet 
been shown forth in events. Holy names, 
great events and sainted memories which are 
dear and familiar and inspiring to ourselves, 
were quite unknown to that time. Catholics 
had then, of course, their own heritage of 



The Richness of Our Heritage 9 I 

history, but it was much less varied and 
ample than our own. 

The Litany of the saints had then only 
been written in part, so to say, on the heart 
of the Church. The richness of the Fran- 
ciscan story, the conquests of Dominic and 
Ignatius, the exploits of their sons, were still 
in the dim future. The stories of Teresa, 
of Catherine of Siena, of Francis Xavier, 
of Louis of France, of Bernard of Clairvaux 
— to name only a few among the thousands 
of great examples — had not been told. 
Every nation has poured a flood of bright 
tradition and shining memories into the brim- 
ming fountains of the Christian story, and 
we are the possessors of those replenished 
fountains. 

Consider, again, our inheritance of Cath- 
olic devotion. Comprehending utterly the 
hearts which He has made, the Holy Spirit, 
while ever maintaining the unchanged teach- 
ing of Christ in His Church, gives to every 
time an element of variety and interest in 
the spiritual life by inspiring new devotions, 
based on Catholic dogma and supported by 
it, but developing into new forms of piety 
and fervor which stir our hearts. Of these 
special devotions some have their day and 



92 The Richness of Our Heritage 

then cease to be, like the great devotion to St. 
Menas the Martyr, which was so popular in 
an early century. Others, appealing to the 
hearts of generation after generation, 
become a part of the permanent inheritance 
of the Church, and enrich its spiritual life. 
In this regard, we are especially blessed, 
for the latter ages of the Church have been 
particularly rich in new and appealing devo- 
tions, while many of the devotions of the 
early Church have been wonderfully devel- 
oped and made easy. Thus, from the day 
of Pentecost itself, devotion to the Blessed 
Sacrament was part of Catholic practice, and 
this is witnessed by the paintings on the walls 
of the Catacombs, those graphic and ingen- 
uous records of the primitive Church. But 
the Blessed Sacrament was not then pre- 
served on a hundred thousand altars as it is 
to-day, nor exposed for the constant venera- 
tion of the faithful. It was generally only 
during the Holy Mass that the Blessed 
Sacrament was present before the adoring 
flock of Christ. It was then distributed in 
holy communion, and the remainder was con- 
sumed by the priest. Thus the presence of 
Our Lord in the Sacrament of His love was 
only for short intervals. He came and went 



The Richness of Our Heritage 93 

like the glimpses of sunshine in a cloudy sky. 
Now, on the contrary, the Sacrament of 
Love is kept by day and by night on many 
altars, so that any one of the faithful can 
come and pray and adore, or at least can 
make spiritual visits and communions at 
some near-by church or chapel where Jesus 
always dwells. How much this means for 
us we can perhaps comprehend by imagining 
how we should feel, if to-morrow the Blessed 
Sacrament were removed from all our altars 
and it were decreed that hereafter It should 
only be present before us during the Holy 
Sacrifice. Yet, by so much we have the 
advantage of our remote forefathers in the 
Faith. 

So, too, devotion to the Blessed Virgin 
was one of the favorite devotions of the 
early Christians, as one sees again when he 
goes through the Catacombs and looks at 
the ancient paintings on their walls of the 
Mother and the Child. But we have fallen 
heirs not only to that primitive and most 
tender devotion, but to all the subsequent 
development of meditation and praise, con- 
cerning the Mother of God. Ours is all 
the wealth of art, literature, prayer, service, 
which the years have brought to the shrine 



94 The Richness of Our Heritage 

of that Most Beloved Woman whom every 
generation delights anew to honor and call 
blessed, with its own accents echoing the 
praise of all past ages and prophesying the 
praises of all generations yet to be. The 
rosary, the prayers and hymns of the Church 
to Mary, the numberless particular devotions 
that have grown up about her name, the 
countless shrines in her honor, the memory 
of her many favors, and apparitions, the 
miracles granted through her intercession — 
all these things are our inheritance, and they 
have wonderfully enriched us with a thou- 
sand means of honoring the Mother of God. 
What shall we say, then, of the new devo- 
tions, unknown in their present forms to 
early ages, with which Our Lord in His 
goodness has kindled the failing charity of 
the earth? Devotion to the Sacred Heart 
comes naturally to one's mind, that consum- 
ing flame of fervor, kept and known from 
early days in the hearts of some great saints, 
but now uncovered and spread abroad that 
it might enkindle the entire earth. Recall 
the tender and burning words which Our 
Lord addressed to St. Margaret Mary, and 
through her to all coming generations of His 



The Richness of Our Heritage 95 

people, pleading for our love, disclosing the 
tenderness and the desires of His most 
Sacred and wounded Heart. To have' heard 
of such accents from the lips of Our Lord, 
would have filled with ecstasy the saints of 
former generations, but it was not given 
to them to hear. Consider how this mes- 
sage of the Sacred Heart would have stirred 
the charity of St. Bernard, inflamed the love 
of St. John of the Cross, thrilled St. Igna- 
tius, enraptured St. Philip Neri, yet not to 
them but to us have the holy accents come. 

With what eagerness would St. Aloysius 
have practiced this devotion, yet it was 
unknown to him in its present form, as we 
have received it from the revelations made 
to St. Margaret Mary. Our heritage is by 
so much richer than theirs. We have been 
favored by so much, beyond their generation. 

In older times too, frequent communion 
as it exists amongst us to-day was unknown. 
In apostolic times, it is true, the faithful 
communicated at every Mass which they 
heard. But as customs changed, the holy 
practice of daily communion became more 
and more rare until at last even the greatest 
saints were not allowed to go to communion 
oftener than a few times a year. Thus, St. 



96 The Richness of Our Heritage 

Louis of France, who sighed to receive the 
Blessed Sacrament more frequently, was per- 
mitted to do so, it is said, only five or six 
times a year. Even in latter days, as our 
Holy Father Pius X, of happy memory, 
declared in his immortal letter on Frequent 
and Daily Communion, there was a dispute 
as to how often ordinary Catholics should 
receive. Now, the Holy Father by that 
same letter has settled the dispute forever. 
It is the wish, he says, of the Pope, the wish 
of the Church, the wish of Our Lord Him- 
self, that every one who can do so, who is 
in a state of grace and has a good intention 
in receiving, should approach the Holy Table 
often, and if possible every day. Consider 
what would have been the exultant joy of 
the saints of old to hear so marvelous and 
so authentic an invitation. Yet it is to our 
time and not to theirs, that this favor has 
been given, and it will descend to future days 
as a part of the Catholic heritage. 

We might continue at great length the 
enumeration of the richness of our inheri- 
tance, but each one for himself may easily 
develop the long series of our blessings. We 
are, in a sense, the spoiled children of God. 
Knowing the special dangers and trials to 



The Richness of Our Heritage 97 

which the Catholics of latter times would be 
exposed, He has prepared from eternity 
these special helps to fortify and console us. 
We shall be wise, then, to use to the full the 
extraordinary graces which lie so ready for 
us. It would be a calamity indeed to miss 
our due share of the bounty of our Father's 
house. 

Those families in which great riches are 
hereditary, whose temporal inheritance; is 
rich and extensive, have usually two desires 
regarding their possessions. They are anx- 
ious, each generation of them, to enjoy to the 
full themselves the advantages of their 
inheritance, and they wish to preserve and 
increase it for the benefit of the children who 
shall come after them. 

We may well imitate the wisdom of these 
children of this world, in regard to our Cath- 
olic heritage. Since we are of the house- 
hold of the Church, we enjoy by the title of 
children of the household the accumulated 
riches of the ages of Catholic piety and devo- 
tion, the great examples of Catholic history, 
the treasures of holy art, the splendors of 
Catholic literature, the thousand aids and 
incentives to goodness that have been gath- 
ered within the portals of the enduring 



98 The Richness of Our Heritage 

Church of God through toiling and suffering 
ages. It behooves us to help ourselves, so 
to say, to our share of this inheritance. We 
must become familiar, by hearing and read- 
ing, with our possessions. We must explore, 
so to say, the treasure-chambers of our 
Mother the Church. If we are strangers 
to Catholic history, aloof from Catholic 
devotion, out of touch with the life of piety 
of the Church, we resemble children who 
leave the house of their father without hav- 
ing seen the good things he has prepared for 
them, and neglect to enjoy their inheritance 
because they do not even know in what it 
consists. 

Converts, who come at a mature age into 
the Church, are often carried away with 
enthusiasm at the wealth and warmth of 
devotion, the glories of tradition, the treas- 
ures of example, the color and light and life 
which they find in their Father's house. 
They are like lost children, who, found and 
brought home at last after they have wan- 
dered in the dark and the cold, take in with 
immense appreciation in comparison with 
their former poverty and loneliness, the 
blessings that now are theirs. But the Cath- 



The Richness of Our Heritage 99 

olic who has been born and brought up in 
the midst of these riches is too often indif- 
ferent to them. He goes outside of His 
Father's house for consolation and joy, look- 
ing for happiness where it is not to be found, 
and neglecting what the great ages have pre- 
pared for him. We should be wiser, being 
so rich in our spiritual possessions. Since 
we are offered so freely such great goods, 
we should at least stretch out our hand 
toward our inheritance. 

The second aspect of the human wisdom 
of great families in regard to their temporal 
riches must not escape us. They seek to 
hand on to their descendants a well-kept and 
increased inheritance, and so too should we. 
In proportion as we use and treasure the 
heritage of the Church, those who come after 
us will know and profit by what we leave to 
them, with honor and appreciation. In 
learning it well and using it eagerly, we are 
preserving and increasing the Catholic inher- 
itance for coming generations. 

Let us pray to realize our own great riches 
and opportunities. There was never a time 
when the heritage of the Church was greater 
than now, for every year of Catholic life has 



ioo The Richness of Our Heritage 

added to that treasury. We, the latest heirs 
of all this devotion, history, example, ritual, 
must learn to profit by God's exceeding pre- 
cious gifts. Let us pray not to be unworthy 
of the greatness of our heritage ! 



CONFIDENCE IN MARY 

TO have a deep and childlike trust in 
the Blessed Mother of God, is a 
source of the most profound and 
genuine consolation. Such a confidence 
ensures, indeed, its own fulfilment. The 
more we rely on that most powerful and 
merciful Mother, the more surely we shall 
experience her bounty and feel the fruits of 
her intercession. To have confidence in 
Mary is to be filled with a practical convic- 
tion of this truth, to look to her unfalter- 
ingly in every trial, to expect from her hands 
all manner of succor and relief. Not only 
does this ingenuous and simple trust guar- 
antee its own accomplishment (for the Best 
and Truest of women cannot disappoint 
those who so trust in her), but the firm 
expectation is in itself a comfort incompar- 
ably precious. Like a child who walks con- 
fidently through the dark, holding its 
mother's hand, we pass peacefully and in 
calm of mind through all the vicissitudes and 

IOI 



102 Confidence in Mary 

dangers of this life, clinging to the hand of 
our Mother in heaven. 

To the Catholic who knows the teachings 
of his holy Faith in regard to the Blessed 
Mother, it is very easy to stir up in his heart 
this precious confidence. Such an implicit 
trust is indeed a logical and very simple con- 
sequence from what we know of the char- 
acter, the office and the place in God's provi- 
dence of this Most Beloved and Blessed of 
all women. When we read the lives of the 
saints, who realized so deeply the teachings 
of the Church about the Mother of God, 
we were surprised at the childlike simplicity 
with which they showed their reliance upon 
her aid. Rather, it should astonish us that 
every Catholic has not a similar trust, for 
what we know of her love, her power and 
her mercy should make us look for her help 
with a simplicity of expectation that would 
surpass the peace of the little child in his 
mother's arms. 

The reasons for confidence in Mary are 
very obvious, very certain, and they sweep 
us with irresistible logic toward a sure 
expectation of her aid in every need or dan- 
ger of our lives. Any one of these reasons 
might make us trust implicitly in her assist- 



Confidence in Mary 103 

ance, but taken altogether, they compel our 
assent if only we shall duly attend to them. 
Whoever has the Catholic faith and does 
not rely on the intercession of God's Mother, 
has either not comprehended or not realized 
the truths which he believes. 

Everything in the character of Mary gives 
us reason for implicit confidence that she will 
protect all her children who rely on her. 
One by one we may tell over the gifts of 
nature and of grace, the dignities of office 
and of power given her by her Divine Son, 
and at each step in our ascent of the peak 
of her prerogatives we come on new reasons 
for confiding in her love and mercy, and 
never discover a single cause for doubting 
either her power or willingness to aid us in 
every need. It is good to count over, even 
briefly, the reasons of our confidence in 
Mary. The trust that they will engender in 
us is needful and precious beyond telling. 

The character of the Blessed Mother of 
God is one of intercessor, advocate, mother 
of all Christians. It is her office to plead 
for us with her Divine Son, not only in the 
great and terrible crises of our lives, but in 
our daily needs and little perplexities. 
Nothing is too great for her power, but 



104 



Confidence in Mary 



nothing is too slight for her motherly care. 
The very first instance recorded in sacred 
history of her intercession, shows this with 
moving power. 

It was at the marriage feast of Cana, 
The watchful eye of the Blessed Virgin, ever 
intent on observing the needs of her children, 
saw, even before the chief steward whose 
charge this was, had observed it, that the 
wine for the guests was nearly exhausted 
before the wedding feast was over. It was 
one of those insignificant but painful happen- 
ings that hurt so sorely. The joy of the 
young couple was to be turned to confusion 
before all the company. It was too late to 
send elsewhere for more wine. Humanly 
speaking, there was nothing for it but to let 
the unconscious and smiling pair be shamed 
before all their guests. 

Still, what strange circumstances, accord- 
ing to usual ways of judging, for Christ's 
first miracle! His hour was not yet come 
for those marvelous outpourings of mercy 
and healing which attested His divine mis- 
sion. Not yet had He begun to preach and 
to heal the people. Was His first public 
miracle to be the relief of a pitiful bit of 
human embarrassment, the saving of this 



Confidence in Mary 105 

young pair from a momentary discomfiture? 

Perhaps the Blessed Mother chose this 
very occasion to exercise her office of advo- 
cate with her Divine Son, to show us that 
no one of our small necessities is beneath her 
notice or beyond her willingness to aid us. 
She was confident, too, that Our Lord would 
listen to her even in this trifling thing, even 
though His hour was not yet come. Though 
His words mav have sounded like a refusal, 
"Woman, what is that to Me and to thee? 
My hour is not yet come;" she says to those 
who serve, "Whatsoever He shall say to you, 
do ye." The water is made wine, the first 
of Christ's miracles is worked in Cana of 
Galilee, and for all time the spirit and power 
of Mary is made known to all Christians, 
a spirit of tender and motherly interest in 
all that concerns even the humblest of her 
children, and a power that can obtain unerr- 
ingly from her most loving Son the least, 
even as the greatest, of favors. 

In this miracle the Blessed Mother stands 
proclaimed as the pitying intercessor for us 
all, in all our needs. We need not wait 
until some agonizing crisis is upon us, we 
may confidently appeal to her in the little 
trials of every day. For this is the office 



io6 Confidence in Mary 

which her Divine Son in His blessed provi- 
dence has allotted to her. She is to be in 
very deed the mother of all mankind, as 
solicitous for our slightest need, as careful 
to avert the least danger from us, as is a 
most tender mother in regard to her child. 

It is at the end of His public life that Our 
Lord declares to us the universal mother- 
hood of Mary. Just as He had indicated 
it to us by the first miracle at Cana, He chose 
to proclaim it in the most solemn and moving 
manner from the pulpit of the cross. Dur- 
ing the last moments of His life, while He 
hung with glazing eyes in the throes of His 
death agony, He looked down and saw 
standing at the foot of the Cross His Mother 
and St. John, the disciple whom He specially 
loved. In this Beloved Apostle the Fathers 
of the Church teach us to see the representa- 
tive of all the members of Christ's Church. 
Then, turning His dying eyes upon His 
Blessed Mother, He said to her : "Woman," 
using the same term with which He had 
addressed her at the marriage feast of Cana, 
"Woman, behold thy son," and to St. John: 
"Behold thy Mother!" 

It was a solemn and formal gift, the dying 
gift of Our Lord to St. John, and in his 



Confidence in Mary 107 

person to us all, of the Mother of God to 
be our mother. The voice of Divine 
Authority, as potent when He spoke from 
the cross of His agony as when of old He 
said the fiat that made the world, ringing 
down the ages forever, declaring to each 
generation of Christians that Mary is their 
mother. Those who are of His fold hear 
that voice, and there is born in their hearts 
a filial trust and affection which surpasses 
any other trust or love that is given to 
woman. That voice of infinite authority 
pierced also the deepest places of Mary's 
most obedient heart, and begot there such a 
mother's love as no other heart of woman 
could ever hold. "Thenceforth," says the 
Gospel, "the Beloved Disciple took her for 
his own." But thenceforth also, the most 
blessed Mother of God took for her own 
not only St. John, but every soul of us all in 
the Church of God, from the beginning even 
until the day of doom. 

It is a thought upon which to build an 
absolute confidence. Imagine to yourself the 
most devoted and dutiful mother in the world 
who cherishes an ailing child. Think of the 
ceaseless vigilance, the tireless assiduity, the 
forethought, the solicitude of such a one, for 



io8 Confidence in Mary 

everything which concerns the welfare of her 
son. Yet, such a mother has never heard 
the voice of God Himself articulately admon- 
ishing her to be a dutiful mother. Our 
Blessed Mother has heard such a voice, and 
the memory of it is graven the more deeply 
on her heart, because every detail of the 
passion of her Beloved Son is forever clear 
to her memory. 

We ourselves may forget the sublime gift 
which Our Saviour offered us from His cross, 
but the Mother whom God has given us 
never forgets. We may wander very far 
from the ways in which she would have us 
go. We may seem abandoned by men, and 
heaven itself may seem closed to us. But 
to the Mother of God, we are still her chil- 
dren, erring children it may be, ruined and 
lost, yet who have been given her for her 
sons and daughters beneath the cross of her 
Son. So she will watch over us, will assist 
us, will count our steps and prepare for us 
grace after grace and opportunity after 
opportunity until such time as the last hour 
allotted to us for this life of trial is ended. 
Then, with what a Mother's smile, if we 
have not been too rebellious to her kind 
persuasions and motherly solicitings, she will 



Confidence in Mary 109 

welcome us to heaven who has done so much 
to bring us thither. 

From any corner of the world, therefore, 
from any pass of life, we have only to lift up 
our eyes to heaven to see there, enthroned 
at the right hand of her Divine Son, our 
very Mother. The angels and the archangels 
pay her reverence. The nine choirs of celes- 
tial spirits all hail her as their Queen. The 
august company of patriarchs and prophets, 
the blessed throng of apostles and disciples, 
the shining army of martyrs, the glorious 
ranks of the confessors and the virgins, all 
the angels and the saints of heaven, acclaim 
her as their Mother. She is exalted unspeak- 
ably above all other creatures, powerful 
beyond all the combined hierarchies of the 
Blessed. She is the glory and honor of the 
Celestial Jerusalem, the delight of the Holy 
Trinity, the Daughter, Mother, Spouse of 
God, the Immaculate, the sinless, the joy of 
heaven and of earth. Yet this most exalted 
and most beloved of all women leans from 
her lofty throne to peer beyond the light of 
heaven into the shadows of this world. From 
the summit of her beatitude she follows 
with a mother's eyes the devious pathway of 
every one of her children who are still in 



no Confidence in Mary 

the vale of tears. In the Woman above all 
women, clothed with the sun and with the 
moon beneath her feet, we have each of us a 
most loving as well as a most powerful 
Mother. The slightest whisper of our prayer 
does not escape her ears. The most obscure 
of our necessities is not unknown to her. 
With the insight and power given her by 
her Son for our weal, she discerns our needs 
before we ourselves are aware of them, and 
answers our petitions before the words are 
cold upon our lips. 

We cannot have too great a confidence in 
the love and power of our Mother in heav<en, 
provided only that we on our part are not 
wanting in what is required of her faithful 
children. Even the Mother of God cannot 
save us nor help us against our will. "God," 
says St. Augustine, "created us without our 
help, but He will not save us without our 
help." In like manner, God has given us, 
without any desert of ours, His Mother to 
be our Mother, but to profit by the protec- 
tion and aid of so good a Mother we must 
do something ourselves. We must have 
confidence in her, practice devotion to her, 
use the graces she obtains for us. Our state 
is a state of probation, and it is of the essence 



Confidence in Mary nr 

of such a state that wc must ourselves work 
out our own salvation of our own free will 
and by following the way which God has 
laid out for us. Though the protection and 
intercession of the Blessed Mother aids us 
to walk in this way of salvation, it will not 
force us to abide therein nor carry us for- 
ward without our own effort and co-opera- 
tion. 

So it would be presumption and an injury 
to the honor of our most holy Mother, to 
neglect our own part and duty and then 
look to her to bring us somehow to a reward 
that we have not deserved. Such confidence 
is not confidence at all, but folly. Yet, 
providing that we are willing to do what 
lies in our power, and ready to co-operate 
with the graces that come to us by her asking, 
we shall find her always the pitiful mother 
of our souls, rich in power, mercy and 
compassion, strong and desirous to help us. 

Sometimes the thought of our own unwor- 
thiness and insignificance may tempt us to 
question whether such creatures as ourselves 
can really claim the love and protection of 
so good a mother. The thought does 
injustice to that Mother's heart. It is not 
for our own merits that she loves us, nor 



112 Confidence in Mary 

because we are worthy of her great devotion, 
but because we have been given to her by 
her Divine Son to be her children, and 
because she sees in us the brothers and sisters 
of that Son, redeemed by His precious Blood. 
Our weakness and insignificance are there- 
fore so much the greater reason why she 
should cherish and love us, and the more 
we are in need of her aid, the more sure 
we can be to obtain it. 

Besides, it is a commonplace of mother's 
love that it fixes itself by preference on the 
weakest and neediest of her family. The 
ailing or unfortunate child is precisely the 
one that claims the largest share of the 
mother's care and love. Now, when Our 
Lord spoke on the cross those moving words : 
"Woman, behold thy son," and, "Behold 
thy Mother," He bade His Mother have a 
mother's heart for us, each and all. With 
the other characteristics of a mother's love, 
surely our Blessed Mother has taken this one 
also, of feeling a special tenderness for the 
afflicted and the wretched among her chil- 
dren. It is thus precisely when we are in 
most need of her aid, that we are most sure 
to secure it. 

To have such an advocate and Mother, is 



Confidence in Mary 113 

one of the greatest of possible blessings. To 
realize the priceless treasure which is ours 
in the love and the protection of such a 
Mother, is a consolation inestimably great. 
Strange, that possessing so sweet an assur- 
ance of aid and sympathy in all our sorrows 
and trials, we should realize so little our 
own great happiness in being the children of 
so faithful and so powerful a Mother. 

In this, as in the case of so many consoling 
teachings of the Church, there is, alas, a sad 
gulf between knowing and realizing, between 
believing and bringing home vividly to our- 
selves the meaning and consequences of our 
belief. We should dwell often on the truth 
that we are the well-beloved and cherished 
children of Mary, that she is our advocate 
given by God to help us in all our afflictions, 
that there is no limit either to her pity or 
her power, until there is born of these 
thoughts so great a confidence, so reasonable 
and filial trust in her love and intercession, 
that we turn first to her in every need and 
derive our greatest consolation from the 
thought of her might to help us with her 
Divine Son. Then we shall indeed experience 
what it means to be a child of Mary, and 
shall repeat with joy those words of the 



114 Confidence in Mary 

Memorare: "Never was it heard, most 
faithful Mother, that anyone asked thy help, 
implored thy aid or sought thy intercession 
without obtaining relief." 



THE PRECIOUS HALF-HOUR 

HOW many earnest Catholic men and 
women of the world are there nowa- 
days who follow a daily order of 
life? In the last half of the last century 
it was quite a common thing to find devout 
Catholics who had a regular order of the 
day, particularly as regarded their devo- 
tional exercises, and who carried it out with 
almost as much fidelity and devotion as 
though they were Religious. This was easier 
then, no doubt, when life was less complex, 
and distractions were less insistent. Then 
the world was quieter and calmer and gave 
one more breathing space for meditation, 
spiritual reading, and an examen of con- 
science that was more than a half-conscious 
glance thrown confusedly over the events of 
the day. Nowadays it is increasingly diffi- 
cult for many lay folk to keep any sort of 
regular order at all. There are so many 
enterprises that call for bits of one's time, so 
many things to read and to hear if one would 
keep abreast of the day, so many friends 

"5 



n6 The Precious Half-hour 

coming in or asking one to go out, in a word, 
such a constant whirlwind of distractions 
that it is exceedingly hard for one who lives 
in the world to keep any regular way of life 
at all. Yet these very conditions which tend 
so to distract the soul and keep it from think- 
ing of serious things, are really that many 
additional reasons for having and trying to 
keep some regular order in one's spiritual 
life. In particular, the current distractions 
of the time make it necessary for us systemat- 
ically to give part of the day to spiritual 
reading. 

Spiritual reading has fallen, one fears, 
somewhat into disuse even among the 
devout. The mechanical heaping-up of cur- 
rent papers and magazines on our library 
tables, the constant pressure of secular liter- 
ature clamoring for attention, so take up 
spare moments and monopolize our interest 
that to sit quietly down and read a spiritual 
book seems to many good folk quite out of 
the question. The characteristic feature of 
modern periodical literature is its insistent 
and clever, thoroughly organized and unre- 
mitting appeal to be read on the spot. The 
remarkable machinery of agents and book- 
sellers, of circulation promoters and of boys 



The Precious Half-hour 117 

on the street, keep pushing under our eyes 
and thrusting into our hands and calling to 
our attention in manifold ways a motley lot 
of magazines and papers gotten up to catch 
the eye, to claim immediate notice, to be 
read on the instant that they have come hot 
from the press. This tremendous pressure 
of secular literature and this unabating and 
continual effort of its promoters to get our 
attention make it the more necessary for us 
to turn deliberately toward the literature of 
eternity, and to strengthen our resolve to do 
a bit of pious reading, if it be only for a half- 
hour every day. That will be a most pre- 
cious and profitable half-hour. At first, 
perhaps, when we take up a spiritual book, 
its unworldly thoughts and serious sentences 
may strike a chill to our hearts after the hot 
eagerness and passionate interest of the 
secular stuff which we have been voraciously 
consuming. There is an unworldliness and 
other-worldliness about spiritual books, 
which do not always appeal to the natural 
man in us. We must put ourselves into the 
proper frame of mind, reflect a moment on 
eternity, recollect the need of some solid 
nourishment for our soul, in order to keep 
ourselves at the task. But, nevertheless, it 



1 1 8 The Precious Half -hour 

is worth our while to persevere. After this 
first disinclination and momentary dislike of 
spiritual reading, our better nature will 
assert itself and take pleasure in this solid 
nourishment. 

We have, after all, many selves within 
ourselves. There is the light-minded, care- 
less creature that sometimes comes to the 
surface and demands to be entertained and 
amused; there is that more serious person- 
ality in us which is interested in sober discus- 
sion and wants information and solid rea- 
sons; and there is, too, the spiritual self 
which realizes its everlasting destiny and is 
consciously on the way toward heaven. That 
first and trivial self of ours will be dis- 
pleased by spiritual reading. It will begin 
to tug and pull for something more inter- 
esting, more in touch with the times, more 
recently written. It will reach out for 
a current novel or suggest the latest maga- 
zine. Our intellectual self, sober and seek- 
ing reasons, may also be inclined at first to 
take little interest in what we read. If we 
are occupied with the life of a saint, whose 
deeds are strange to human nature and who 
conquered self to such a sublime degree that 
the natural man can no longer understand 



The Precious Half -hour 119 

his actions, then our matter-of-fact and intel- 
lectual self may perhaps wish a little more 
of discursive argument. But our spiritual 
self, that hungers in us for the love of God 
and for supernatural things, will more and 
more assert itself as it is nourished more 
and more by this strong food of the soul. 

It is exceedingly important that we should 
nourish that better self and disregard the 
hungry clamor of what is light and foolish 
in us, because the craving for entertainment, 
the appetite for light literature, gradually 
hurts our minds and our hearts. If we nour- 
ish a task for folly at the expense of our 
soul's welfare, we may become after a while 
profoundly unreligious, worldly, and trivial 
and be so entirely intent on the present as 
to be disregardful of our soul's eternal 
destiny. 

It is very prudent, therefore, for us to 
resolve most strongly to make at least one 
half-hour of spiritual reading every day. 
And what shall we choose for the subject 
matter? Exceedingly good advice in this 
regard is to pick out in the beginning some- 
thing that we expect to find interesting and 
that rather fits in with our general likings. 
To force one's self through a spiritual book 



120 The Precious Half -hour 

which is not at all interesting and is entirely 
foreign to our taste, is sometimes a disas- 
trous experiment. We may get so sick and 
tired of what we are reading, that the mem- 
ory refuses to do its task, the will is not 
moved, and our precious half-hour becomes 
a merely mechanical drudgery of forcing 
ourselves to read what we do not appreciate 
nor perhaps even understand. With good 
books as with food, to paraphrase Bacon's 
well-known simile, what is well-chewed and 
thoroughly digested does us most good, and 
this is particularly true of spiritual books, 
which require to be thoroughly digested in 
order properly to nourish our souls. As 
bodily appetite is a great help to good diges- 
tion, so the hunger that our minds have for 
a spiritual book or the interest we feel in 
perusing it, is a great aid to assimilating 
what we read. Look among the spiritual 
books that offer themselves and find some- 
thing toward which you feel attracted. Go 
into a Catholic bookstore or into a lending 
library and browse about until you find some 
good book which whets your mental appetite. 
A most salutary sort of reading, as is 
remarked in another chapter, is a well- 
written life of a saint. But one caution may 



The Precious Half-hour 121 

be given in regard to lives of the saints. The 
saints were citizens of their time and their 
country as well as citizens of heaven. Their 
actions, therefore, were sometimes colored 
by the surroundings in which they lived. 
Again, not all that the saints did is entirely 
for our imitation, because at times they went 
to extremes in the practice of virtue which 
we cannot copy, and at other times their 
heroic courage and the special strength that 
God gave them enabled them to perform 
mortifications and good works beyond our 
strength. In following the saints, therefore, 
we should try to imitate their essential spirit 
of piety and devotion rather than the exte- 
rior actions, sometimes strange and peculiar 
to our notions, which were the manifesta- 
tions of their interior spirit. We can always 
safely imitate them in their love of God and 
of their neighbor, in their spirit of prayer, 
in the interior mortification which they 
showed in bearing the trials God gave them 
and in refraining from what they knew was 
harmful to their souls. But when it comes 
to imitating their exterior actions, even their 
method of dealing with others, we must have 
a care ; because these were often profoundly 
influenced by the circumstances in which they 



122 The Precious Half -hour 

lived and by the special inspirations and 
strength which God gave to them. It is 
quite possible that a course of action which 
was the proper way for a saint and tended 
greatly to his spiritual profit, would actually 
wreck our health and perhaps even hurt our 
souls. It is then the spirit and the interior 
disposition of the saints that we should copy 
rather than their exterior way of life. 

Besides the lives of the saints there are a 
host of other spiritual books, some of them 
excellent, others not so suited to our indi- 
vidual needs. A great many good authors 
have undertaken to write spiritual works 
which may have been suited to their own time 
and have met very well the special needs of 
those whom they addressed, but which are 
more or less unsuitable to this age and 
require to be read with some discretion. In 
choosing our reading, therefore, we do well 
to take the advice of some thoroughly 
instructed person, preferably a priest, and 
especially one's confessor, and to ask guid- 
ance concerning the books it would be best 
to read, having in view one's natural disposi- 
tion and needs. 

It is a point of very particular importance 
to assign some special time of the day, and, 



The Precious Half -hour 123 

if one can, to fix some particular hour or 
half-hour during which always to practice 
spiritual reading. If the thing is left to 
chance or to opportunity, there are so many 
other claims that will arise to take up our 
time, that this precious half-hour will invari- 
ably get crowded out. It is only by fixing a 
definite time for spiritual exercises and par- 
ticularly for this half-hour of spiritual read- 
ing, that we can succeed in keeping it up. 
Then we should make it a point of honor 
and self-respect to persevere. Who is there 
that does not waste half an hour during the 
day, or at least who could not economize 
that much out of the unnecessary things we 
all are prone to do? Somehow, we always 
succeed in getting leisure enough three times 
a day for nourishing our body; and no matter 
how busy we are, we contrive to be pretty 
regular at this necessary exercise. Now (to 
repeat again an excellent if homely compari- 
son), it is really as necessary to feed one's 
soul with good thoughts as it is to keep up 
the strength of the body by food. If one 
is regular in making spiritual reading, one 
finds by degrees that one gets a healthy 
hunger for good thoughts which will demand 
satisfaction, just as the bodily hunger recurs 



124 The Precious Half -hour 

at the times when we are used to refreshing 
our body with food. 

Choose a time of day, too, when you are 
not too liable to interruptions, and when you 
can count on a half-hour to yourself. Unfor- 
tunately, our material needs and present 
occupations are always likely to encroach on 
devotional exercises, so if we are not very 
determined and careful about choosing this 
time and keeping to it, the precious half-hour 
will gradually be reduced to a quarter of an 
hour, and then perhaps vanish away alto- 
gether. It would be well not to post- 
pone beginning this good practice. Betake 
yourself to-day to the bookstore or the 
library and choose an interesting book, and 
then sternly set off half an hour each day 
in which you will do nothing else but read. 
It will be extremely helpful if you can per- 
suade some friends of yours to make a sim- 
ilar resolution and to meet together, now and 
then at least, for spiritual reading. A very 
edifying example is given by mothers of 
families who gather their sons and daugh- 
ters about them at some quiet half-hour of 
the day to read a spiritual book. The rest 
can do some handiwork while one reads, and 
so the time passes very quickly and pleas- 



The Precious Half -hour 125 

antly. Where several friends come together 
for half an hour each day they may follow 
the same plan, taking turns, one reading 
while the others work. 

How little we sometimes have to show for 
eternity in the course of a busy day. We 
have been extremely industrious and seem to 
have accomplished very little. But if we 
have had an effective resolve to spend each 
day this precious half-hour in spiritual read- 
ing, there will be at least one bright land- 
mark among the hours, when we look back 
over them after the day is done. We shall 
have given half an hour entirely to God and 
to holy thoughts, and our minds, refreshed 
and nourished by what we have heard or 
read during this precious half-hour, will have 
been strengthened and our will inflamed with 
a love of God and of spiritual things which 
will last during all the other actions of the 
entire day. 



OUR DEVOTIONS 

The dogmas of the Church are 
unchangeable and unchanged, they 
are more lasting than the hills, more 
enduring than the ocean. Guaranteed in 
their immutable truth by the fidelity of God, 
they defy the years and outlast all ages. 
As they were in the apostolic days, so they 
shall be when the Son of man comes with 
power and majesty for the general judgment. 
If the Catholics of the last day could go back 
and listen to Peter preaching on the first 
Pentecost, they would discern the utter iden- 
tity of his doctrine with that which they shall 
be taught so many weary cycles afterward 
in the extreme old age of the world. To 
use a luminous illustration, the dogmas of 
the Church are like those ancient cathedrals, 
centuries old and incrusted with the lichens 
of many, years, which lift their solid bulk 
from the soil of Europe, standing unchanged 
and imperishable like islands of eternity in 
the midst of the swirling streams of time. 

Generations have risen and perished, crowds 

126 



Our Devotions 127 

of worshippers have come and gone. The 
dwellings at their base have crumbled and 
been renewed. The face of the land has 
changed during many seasons. Yet these 
immutable reminders of the faith and fervor 
of Christendom still rear their stubborn bulk 
over the world, seeming to gather new firm- 
ness with the passage of years and to sink 
their solid foundations deeper in the earth 
and harden their rocky walls the more 
against the blows of time. 

But side by side with the dogmas of the 
Church, changing while they are unchanged, 
an element of constant variety and color in 
the age-long life of the Spouse of Christ, the 
devotions of the faithful, agreeing with the 
doctrines of the Church and in accord with 
her holy principles, rise and flourish, increase 
and are renewed, and bring diversity, interest 
and fervor to the faithful of every age in the 
practice of religious duties. These devo- 
tions are special exercises of worship, paid 
with interior fervor and warmth of love to 
some special mystery in the life of Christ or 
His Blessed Mother, to some particular 
saint, or to some attribute or part of the 
divine Humanity. From among the many 
objects of Christian devotion, the preference 



128 Oar Devotions 

of the faithful selects with a holy instinct 
some one to be particularly honored. The 
general fervor and common zeal of many 
pious souls kindling together with such a 
special devotion, serves to light and fire still 
others to the practice of the same reverence, 
until a new devotion is established in and 
approved by the Church, and a new beauty 
and fervor is added to the worship of the 
faithful. 

The origin of some of these devotions of 
the Church has been miraculous, and they 
are thus the result of a direct interposition 
of Heaven. The form of adoration of the 
Blessed Sacrament expressed in the feast of 
Corpus Christi, was the outcome of a special 
revelation made to the Blessed Juliana Fal- 
conieri. Devotion to the Sacred Heart as 
we know it, is the consequence of the revela- 
tions of Our Lord to Saint Margaret Mary. 
Every one knows how the devotion to Our 
Lady of Lourdes took its rise from her 
apparitions to that favored daughter of the 
poor, Bernadette Soubirous. So, many 
others of the devotions now popular among 
the faithful have been either originated or 
confirmed by miracles. 

The practice of devotions is greatly in 



Our Devotions 129 

accord with the spirit of Catholicity and is 
heartily approved and encouraged by the 
Church of Christ. It is an instinct of our 
human nature to pay special worship to the 
particular friends of God or to objects inti- 
mately consecrated to His honor and service. 
One remarks, even in pagan lands, the per- 
version of this natural instinct in the multi- 
plication of endless shrines to false deities, 
the worship of fabulous heroes and the ven- 
eration of mythical articles of devotion, of 
the tooth of Buddha, the hair from Moham- 
med's beard and so on, ad nauseam. This 
craving for objects of devotion though per- 
verted and misdirected by false creeds, is the 
voice of the human heart crying for objects 
which it may reverence and admire. The 
pagan religions feed this instinct with the 
chaff and straw of imaginary and mythical 
objects of veneration. The Christian Faith 
alone answers this craving of the heart with 
holy and worthy objects of reasonable 
reverence. 

It is well for us all to choose from among 
the many objects which the Church has sanc- 
tioned as the recipients of our devotion, those 
which appeal the most nearly to our heart. 
Some choice is necessary, because it is quite 



130 Our Devotions 

impracticable for each to cherish them all 
in a special way. Devotion supposes par- 
ticular remembrance, love and service, and 
it is obviously impossible, with our limited 
time and finite powers, to give these to all 
of the many objects of reverence proposed 
to us. It is, therefore, the intention of our 
Holy Mother the Church that we should 
select from among the many devotions 
approved by her, those which especially suit 
us at the time. For different ages and dif- 
ferent states of life Divine Providence has 
given different ones, beautiful and appealing. 
Thus, for the young the Church encourages 
the love and veneration of youthful saints 
like St. Agnes and St. Aloysius. For those 
who are older, she holds up for special rever- 
ence and imitation those who have gone 
farther in the ways of life and who thus offer 
models of a more mature sanctity. No one 
is under any duty to choose one or the other 
patron. But all will naturally select that 
model who comes more near to their own 
condition and need. 

Besides these special devotions, there are 
some of universal appeal and which the 
Church desires for all her children. Chief 
among these comes devotion to the Blessed 



Our Devotions 131 

Sacrament, which is a compendium of all the 
marvels of God's love and in which we wor- 
ship the incarnate Son of God Himself and 
commemorate all His multiplied mercies, 
His sacrifice on the cross for our salvation, 
and His age-long dwelling amongst us in the 
Sacrament of His love. Next in dignity to 
that given to Christ Himself, is devotion to 
His Blessed Mother, most worthy of all 
mere creatures to be honored and revered, 
and to whose intercession we owe under God 
the graces which sustain us. Next, perhaps, 
in the esteem of the faithful comes devotion 
to St. Joseph, and then follows the long pro- 
cession of patrons whose bright example and 
gentle intercession light up the paths of men 
down all the centuries. 

In regard to devotions there are two 
extremes which even well-instructed Cath- 
olics have sometimes to be counselled to 
avoid. One is the giving up of all these 
practices, as though they were something 
childish and fanciful and not needed in the 
spiritual life of those who are solid and 
mature. The other is the multiplication of 
endless devotions, which become burdensome 
and vexatious, interfere with one's regular 
duties, and sometimes actually offer an 



. 



132 Our Devotions 

impediment to progress in perfection because 
they take up time and energy which should 
be given to fulfilling obligations, and give 
one a feeling of being pious and dutiful when 
as a matter of fact one may be neglecting, 
for the sake of these pious practices, much 
more necessary matters. 

A delusion which likewise follows at times 
from this excess is the feeling that one must 
get through a certain number of pet devo- 
tions each day or incur somehow a curse or 
grievous detriment. Beset with this unrea- 
sonable fear, some misguided people make 
themselves martyrs of a routine of devotions, 
plaguing themselves with groundless fears 
and rushing to accomplish all the tasks they 
have arbitrarily set themselves, as though 
salvation itself depended on getting through 
their whole category of practices every day. 

Though this abuse of the spirit of devo- 
tion is regrettable, the state of those superior 
persons who think themselves able to dis- 
pense with any devotions at all, is rather 
worse. It is said of one of the unhappy 
leaders of the so-called "Old Catholics, " 
whose apostasy from the Church after the 
infallibility of the Pope had been defined 
against their protests, gave so great a scan- 



Our Devotions 133 

dal, that one of the first signs of his defec- 
tion from Catholic teaching was his refusal 
to use holy water. This was a slight thing 
in itself, yet it showed that the tide of his 
feeling and inclination was setting away from 
the practices of the Church. It is an omi- 
nous thing when one departs from practices 
common to Catholics throughout the world 
and which are the spontaneous expression of 
piety and fervor. 

The golden mean, therefore, between 
these two extremes is to be heartily recom- 
mended. One should first make sure to have 
deeply at heart and to practice when occa- 
sion serves, the great and general devotions 
to the Blessed Sacrament, to the Sacred 
Heart of Our Lord and to His Blessed 
Mother. Gratitude would seem also to 
require us to have special reverence for our 
Guardian Angel, for our patron saints, and 
those citizens of heaven whose intercession 
has been especially helpful to us and who 
have most notably answered our prayers. 
We should also have compassion on the Poor 
Souls in Purgatory, and it is hard to see how 
any one with a feeling heart can fail to prac- 
tice toward them the devotion of ransoming 
prayer and to gain them the easy deliverance 



134 Our Devotions 

from their weary sufferings, which we can 
win for them by little acts of mortification 
and sacrifice. When these great devotions 
are deeply rooted in our soul and reasonably 
expressed in our prayers and pious works, 
we may go forth and glean as we will the 
other flowers with which the sweet meadows 
of the Church abound. 

Neither should one fear, when reason 
offers or just inclination leads, to change 
one's unessential devotions and to seek new 
fervor in some other approved and vener- 
able practice of the Church. The inhabit- 
ants of heaven are not jealous, and all the 
honor which we pay to the saints redounds 
to the glory of their Maker, Redeemer and 
Sanctifier who is the Lord Most High. Yet 
there are two cautions which one should bear 
in mind in taking up new devotions. The 
one is, not to accept nor practice any novelty 
before being assured that it is in full con- 
formity with the spirit of the Church and 
approved by competent authority. For this 
reason the older devotions are the safer. 
Indeed, from time to time some enthusiast 
imposes upon the faithful with an invented 
devotion, specious enough, but to which the 
Church cannot give her sanction. Devo- 



Our Devotions 135 

tions are not dogmas of the Church, but they 
must never be in conflict with her dogmas 
nor with the spirit of the Faith. Untried 
and new practices may often have an element 
of danger. As for such things as the u chain 
of prayers," which is sent about with a 
threat that some indefinite disaster will 
happen to him who breaks the chain, and the 
claim that some magical efficacy is attached 
to the mere saying of the prayer, sensible 
Catholics scarcely need to be warned against 
such impostures. When one receives a 
letter of this kind one's duty is to tear it up 
and think no more of the matter. It is 
wrong to take up or to spread such injur- 
ious frauds. They are discreditable to 
religion. 

The second caution which the multiplica- 
tion of devotions sometimes makes necessary 
is that one should not allow new and second- 
ary exercises to usurp the place of the great 
established and primary devotions of the 
Church, to the Sacred Heart of Our Lord, 
to the Blessed Sacrament and to the Holy 
Mother of God. The waves of new prac- 
tices which have periodically swept over the 
faithful in recent times have sometimes 
interfered with these fundamental devotions, 



136 Our Devotions 

particularly with that to the Blessed Virgin. 
The pious exercises which are possible to the 
faithful have definite limits and so have the 
time and fervor which they can give to devo- 
tions. Hence, if an immense wave of vener- 
ation toward some special saint is spread in 
a locality, devotion to the Blessed Mother 
is in danger of suffering a partial eclipse. 
This should by all means be guarded against, 
for it is no true service to any of the heav- 
enly company to celebrate their praise or 
seek their intercession at the expense of the 
honor of their Mother and Queen. All the 
reverence we pay to saints and all our true 
devotions have as their final aim the honor 
of God, who is glorified in all His saints. 
But after the reverence we pay Christ Him- 
self, the most pleasing of all devotions to 
His Sacred Heart must surely be that which 
we give to His most Beloved Mother. 



TURNING LIFE TO PRAYER 

To pray well is a subject of constant 
difficulty. Many good and devout 
persons complain exceedingly of 
aridity and distractions in prayer. They 
find it hard to keep their attention fixed on 
the great work they are doing during those 
times of the day when they give themselves 
of set purpose to prayer. They complain 
of the swarm of distractions which, like 
pestiferous insects, buzz about their head 
during the holy hours assigned to medita- 
tion. The dullness of routine, the monotony 
of accustomed words, the torpor of the mind 
which comes from use and repetition of the 
same forms of prayer, clog their intelligence, 
so it seems to them, and dull the will, so that 
their praying becomes an effort and a trial. 
Many wise counsels have been offered to 
such complaining souls concerning the need 
of having a method in prayer and of taking 
the proper measures to vary and diversify 
one's meditations and to make them fervent 
and interesting. But when these means are 

137 



138 Turning Life to Prayer 

tried for a while, the old difficulty of praying 
returns unabated. The case is much the 
same as regards the making of occasional 
prayers during the day. The practice of 
brief and fervent ejaculations helps indeed 
very greatly to keep up the spirit of fervor 
and the recollection of God's presence, and 
it is to be very much recommended to every 
one who wishes to lead a fervent life. But 
even this practice sometimes becomes monot- 
onous or it is forgotten in the rush and dis- 
traction of busy days, so the difficulty of 
praying persists most vexatiously. Many a 
good soul who would like to be the intimate 
friend of God and to enjoy the delights of 
converse with Him in frequent and fervent 
prayer, finds that this holy exercise, which 
should in theory be the greatest consolation 
and pleasure to the devout soul, is, in prac- 
tice, a war with aridity, distractions and 
indevotion. 

There is a happy practice that may be used 
in this connection, which if well understood 
and perseveringly followed out, should go 
far toward curing this chronic trouble in 
prayer. It is a simple thing yet lies very 
near to the root of the difficulty in praying. 
It is a secret of the saints, yet open and easy 



Turning Life to Prayer 139 

for the use even of those who are still far 
down the slope of perfection and are strug- 
gling toward the distant summit. It con- 
sists, in a word, in turning our life to prayer. 
God is with us always and listening always 
to the movements of our heart. His omni- 
science makes Him perfectly aware of the 
slightest motions of our being. Our intelli- 
gence and our will are an open book to His 
all comprehending eyes. He knows us infi- 
nitely better than we know ourselves. He is, 
besides, most interested in all that concerns 
us, even in the slightest and seemingly most 
trivial things. With God, nothing is either 
great or small, because He is infinitely 
removed from the great and infinitely near 
to the little. To attend to the endless 
details of His creation is to Him not the 
slightest effort. The whisper of a little 
child, babbling its prayer with only a faint 
comprehension of its meaning, sounds as 
clear in the ears of God as the mighty suppli- 
cations of the saints. 

From God's side, therefore, there is no 
difficulty in turning our life to prayer. St. 
Paul bids us, "Pray always!" and this 
exhortation has bewildered literal and duti- 
ful souls who cannot understand how it is 



140 Turning Life to Prayer 

possible to be forever at prayer. But they 
need not be perplexed at the objection that 
God could not listen to the multiplied peti- 
tions if all mankind were constantly to pray. 
His infinite attention and unending compas- 
sion are ready at every instant, and He easily 
perceives all the manifold motions of innum- 
erable hearts. The difficulty, alas! is all 
from our side. Believing and knowing that 
our Father in Heaven is always ready to give 
good things to them that ask Him, and con- 
scious at the same time of our manifold occa- 
sions to ask His pity and His aid, we still 
find it so difficult to join these two truths 
together and make them the fertile source 
and well-spring of fervent supplication. If 
only we could find some method, we say to 
ourselves, of making all the needs and sor- 
rows of our life the motives of our prayer. 
There is a way of doing this, and a very 
simple one. It consists in strengthening our 
faith and realization of the presence of God 
and of His attentive goodness and then of 
schooling ourselves to turn every event of 
our days which rouses in us either joy or 
sorrow, anxiety or relief, security or appre- 
hension, into an occasion to let our heart 
speak to our Heavenly Father and say to 



Turning Life to Prayer 141 

Him whatever we are moved to say by the 
happening of the moment. To do this 
habitually is to turn our whole lives into a 
constant prayer. 

The first step toward this happy consum- 
mation is, let us say again, to strengthen our 
realization of the presence of God and of 
His infinite interest in us and boundless 
desire to hear and help us. Unless we have 
a practical realization of God's nearness to 
us, and a firm conviction of His constant 
willingness to befriend us if only we will ask 
His aid, we shall not have the incentive to 
think of Him and speak of Him in every joy 
and vicissitude of our life. Unhappily, we 
may believe very firmly in the goodness and 
readiness of God to help us and yet realize 
this truth so little that in an occasion of 
special joy or sorrow, we may think of going 
to almost any one else to tell our rejoicing 
or tribulation before we turn to that Friend 
who, more than all others together, can 
understand and share our exultation or our 
grief. 

So great a gulf there is between merely 
believing, and knowing and realizing and 
putting in practice, that if we could manage 
to realize the things we know by our faith, 



142 Turning Life to Prayer 

we should all be saints. When we have 
finished the little Catechism, we all of us 
know enough to make us very holy. The 
rest of our lives must be spent in trying to 
realize and apply to ourselves those truths 
which in themselves have been the food of 
saints and the inspiration of the confessors 
of the faith. It is, therefore, no little task 
to realize the presence of God and His infi- 
nite friendliness. It will be very much 
worth our while to begin this task with the 
greatest fervor, and to resolve to bring home 
to ourselves the consoling teachings of the 
faith concerning God's all-presence, all- 
goodness and all-willingness to help us. 

This may be done, first of all, in medita- 
tion, when we go aside for an hour or part 
of an hour from all distractions and occupa- 
tions and turn our thoughts directly to God 
and the things of God. Then, let us think 
as serious and as vividly as we can, about 
what faith teaches us concerning the good- 
ness of the Father of mercies and let us make 
the most fervent acts of which we are capable 
of faith in His all-presence, all-goodness and 
all-power, of hope in His most faithful prom- 
ises, and of devoted and unselfish love of 
His goodness, for His own sake, and because 



Turning Life to Prayer 143 

He is so lovable in Himself. Whatever 
time we can spend in this holy exercise of 
realization will be well invested indeed for 
the interests of eternity. Because whatever 
realization we can manage to seize hold on 
of God's friendship, knowledge and power, 
will vastly help us to turn our lives to prayer. 
After this effort at realization, we shall 
find ourselves more convinced in a practical 
way, that God is near us, listening and wait- 
ing for whatever we have to say to Him. 
Then, we can begin to acquire or increase 
the habit of turning to Him in every event 
of our life and sharing with Him whatever 
joy or affliction comes our way. The more 
vivid our realization of God's presence, the 
more practical our sense of His interest in 
us and willingness to help us, the more con- 
stant will be our conversation with Him and 
therefore the more perpetual and efficacious 
our prayer. Nor is it necessary in this per- 
petual conversation with Almighty God that 
we should use any words or should formulate 
what we have to say to Him. Words are 
not necessary in order that God may under- 
stand us, because He reads the secrets of our 
hearts, and knows what we wish to say even 
before we have put it into words. "Heart 



144 Turning Life to Prayer 

speaketh to heart," and it is only necessary 
for us to direct the intention of our wills to 
Almighty God in confidence and supplication, 
resignation or thanksgiving, to turn the 
whole motion of our heart into a prayer, and 
to transform the movements of our soul, joy 
or sorrow, anxiety or satisfaction, into the 
corresponding acts of petition, thanksgiving 
and adoration. 

Now, joy and sorrow, fear, anticipation, 
the planning of the future, the struggles of 
the present, our every-day perplexities, our 
trials, defeats and victories, anxieties and 
triumphs, these are the stuff of which our 
life itself is made. If, therefore, we can 
succeed in this extremely simple and prac- 
tical way in turning all these emotions and 
movements of our souls into prayers, we 
shall have made our whole life a prayer and 
shall have learned to follow out in a wonder- 
ful way that startling exhortation of St. Paul 
to "pray always." Our heart itself will be 
praying in all its manifold movements and 
desires; yearning to God in supplication at 
the first thought of a trial to be met or a 
difficulty to be encountered; singing to Him 
in praise over every good gift with which His 
divine providence delights our heart; ador- 



Turning Life to Prayer 145 

ing Him in all the events of life and speaking 
to Him familiarly by a holy habit of intimate 
friendship and as a friend speaks to a dear 
and trusted friend. 

It is orj£ of the most marvelous things in 
creation, that we who are so infinitely 
beneath God in our nature can, through His 
incomprehensible condescension, become in 
truth and literally His intimate friends. It 
was a thing never dreamed of by the keenest 
and most speculative minds of pagan times 
that the infinite, the uncreated, that God to 
whom their intellects had struggled through 
the mists of polytheism and toward whom 
their wills yearned with a desperate desire, 
would actually raise human beings to the 
level of friendship, which supposes some sort 
of equality and requires a deification, so to 
speak, of human nature. But our obtuse- 
ness is as pathetic as God's condescension is 
marvelous and sublime, and we are as slow, 
alas, in profiting by His friendship to turn 
our lives into perpetual prayer as He is swift 
and pitiful to hear and heed the slight and 
daily motions of our heart. 

This is one of those great secrets of the 
saints which leads swiftly and surely to the 
heights of goodness. If we have the cour- 



146 Turning Life to Prayer 

age and industry to turn our whole lives into 
prayer, we shall soon become great friends 
and intimates of God. One thought, in con- 
clusion, may make this practice easier for us. 
God, in His exceeding great love, has become 
a man for our salvation, dwells upon our 
altars and is present amongst us in the 
Blessed Sacrament, our constant and most 
pitiful Friend. Can we find it hard to 
remember to converse with God and turn 
all the motions of our hearts into prayer by 
directing them toward Him, when this great 
miracle of God's mercy and tenderness 
dwells so intimately amongst us ? Teach your 
heart to be reminded by every incident of 
life to lean and yearn habitually toward 
Christ in the Eucharist and direct to Him, 
in joy, in sorrow, in fear and desire every 
motion of your soul. Then, you will have 
found a heaven upon earth, and your whole 
life will turn to prayer, 



A STRANGE DELUSION 

POETS and philosophers all unite in 
assuring us that this world is u but a 
fleeting show for man's illusion 
given." The transiency and instability of 
mortal things is a favorite theme for moral- 
ists and singers. From the first dawn of 
days until this introspective time, men have 
been assuring themselves and one another 
that nothing mortal is enduring and that we 
have not here a lasting habitation. In the- 
ory, we all admit this very obvious truth. 
Yet in practice, it is one of the most curious 
phenomena of human nature, to see the 
strange delusion of permanence which comes 
to most men and women in the midst of the 
flux and change of this fleeting thing called 
Life. 

While they quite freely profess in theory 
that all things pass away and we along with 
them, in practice they act and think as though 
they and the world were to endure forever. 
There is a curious little twist in the civil 
law as we remember it, which illustrates quite 

147 



148 A Strange Delusion 

well this comical inclination of our human 
nature to look on life as a thing of indefinite 
duration. An estate which is to endure for 
the whole lifetime of the possessor is counted 
as a nobler estate than one for a hundred 
years. The reason, given in weighty legal 
commentaries, is that a lifetime is of indefi- 
nite duration, whereas a term of years is 
fixed and determined, and so the one is 
nobler than the other. Because our life is 
indefinitely long, we forget that it is like- 
wise indefinitely short, and our tendency 
always is to think of living as a permanent 
thing, instead of considering dying as a cer- 
tain one. 

This illusion of permanence can scarcely 
be broken, even by the better teachings of 
experience. Those who are constantly face 
to face with dyings and partings, the nurses 
in great public hospitals, the physicians in 
active practice, who see perpetual evidence 
of the nothingness of life in the constant 
deaths about them, seem oftentimes as sub- 
ject to this delusion as the rest of men. They 
frequently appear in practice to consider 
that they themselves are immune from the 
common fate which they see pursuing all the 
rest of mankind. They may live as though 



A Strange Delusion 149 

this perpetual dying did not warn them that 
they too must die. The result of this delu- 
sion of the permanence of life, acted out in 
daily affairs, is of course and first of all to 
make men ridiculous. Delusions always 
have a comic side, and the more serious and 
profound they are, the more laughable 
their results sometimes appear. The very 
gravity with which men go about doing 
silly things is sometimes irresistibly funny, 
and the more sober their delusions the 
more hilarious becomes the laughter of the 
lookers-on. 

It is said that the exhibitions of hypnotists 
are very ridiculous for this very reason of 
the complete delusion of their victims. Told 
that some scraps of paper are precious coins, 
the subject of the hypnotist scrambles madly 
for them and holds on to them like a miser. 
Assured that the empty table before him is 
loaded with good things to eat, he goes to 
work with gusto at an imaginary banquet, 
eating and drinking thin air as though it were 
luscious food and wine. The onlookers roar 
with laughter because the man is so serious 
in his folly. But to the hypnotized man 
these imaginations are realities, and wrapped 
in the delusion he is utterly unconscious of 



150 A Strange Delusion 

his own absurdities. In the same way the 
mildly insane are sometimes very funny in 
their illusions. The seriousness with which 
they assert things utterly unreal makes them 
absurd. 

The case is much the same with those men 
and women who give themselves up so seri- 
ously to the delusion of the permanence of 
life and the endurance of mortal things. They 
too, are clutching an imaginary treasure. 
They are pursuing benefits that exist only in 
their mind's eye, and playing parts as ridicu- 
lous as those that lunatics imagine. Viewed 
in the light of the facts, their antics may well 
make men smile and angels weep, they are 
so utterly out of joint with the stern realities 
of things. 

It is strange and pitiful how otherwise 
sensible men give way to the mad passion 
for making money. They know well that 
their possession and enjoyment of whatever 
they can gain, is precarious in the extreme. 
They see about them innumerable instances 
of people who have built houses for others 
to live in, gathered gear for others to waste 
and spend. They know quite well that even 
though they were to live to the extreme limit 
of human days, they will soon have to relin- 



A Strange Delusion .151 

quish what they have got together and go 
to give an account of their stewardship to the 
Lord from whom all things come. Yet, 
despite this knowledge, they work as ear- 
nestly and plan as tirelessly for gain as 
though what they were getting were to last 
forever. It seems quite to escape their reali- 
zation, how utterly they will have to relin- 
quish and leave behind all their earthly pos- 
sessions, when they die. 

A very similar delusion afflicts those other 
men and women who work for fame. How 
eagerly they plan and strive to build up 
among their contemporaries a certain repu- 
tation. Some time since, a very grave and 
self-sufficient dogmatizer of the agnostic 
school was summing up the sanctions of right 
conduct, and he solemnly asserted that chief 
among the motives for keeping in the path 
of rectitude and doing one's duty in this 
world is "fear of judgment." But the 
"judgment" which, according to his subse- 
quent explanation, was to deter a man from 
misdeeds and keep him in the path of service 
to the state and to society was "the judg- 
ment" — save the mark! — u of his contem- 
poraries!" In other words, the final trib- 
unal of justification in the mind of this sen- 



152 A Strange Delusion 

tentious gentleman is the current public 
opinion of one's time! 

A strange delusion! The public opinion 
of any time is as fluent and changeable as 
life itself. The judgment of one's contem- 
poraries is as fickle and passing a thing as 
can be imagined. It is born of the breath 
of men and dies with the sound of the words 
that give it birth. Yet, somehow, this fleet- 
ing breath of public opinion seems in the eyes 
of many like the wiseacre quoted above, to 
have a permanent and lasting value. Their 
chief aim in life is to win the good opinion 
of their fellows. They are entirely forget- 
ful, meanwhile, of the good opinion of 
Almighty God, which alone will endure and 
matter when their "contemporaries" are no 
more. 

This is the way of the world. Without 
shame because without realization of their 
strange delusion, serious-minded and self- 
sufficient men and women go gravely about 
the business of life crammed full of wrong 
standards and false judgments of the value 
of things. They sweat and labor for 
shadows, they build and plan as if they were 
to live in this world for eternal years. Deeply 
solicitous about the next moment and care- 



A Strange Delusion 153 

ful to provide for a long stay on earth, they 
seem entirely to forget the imminence of 
death and the certainty of eternity, and they 
are as careless as children about the life to 
come, while they are as wise as sages about 
the life that is. 

One might understand such an attitude on 
the part of those who are so unfortunate as 
to have no belief in the hereafter and who 
therefore wish to make the most of what 
they possess in this world. But it is hard, 
indeed, to understand how men and women, 
who truly believe in the world to come and 
who profess their faith in judgment and in 
an everlasting punishment or reward, can 
calmly live as though these tremendous reali- 
ties did not exist at all, and as though the 
be-all and the end-all were this little life with 
its trifling amusements, gains and enterprises. 
We sometimes wonder at the utter shiftless- 
ness of that large class of vagabonds called 
tramps, who wander about in the South in 
winter and in the North in the summer time, 
enjoying the mere pleasure of loafing, and 
without any care for to-morrow. The entire 
improvidence of such fellows shocks and 
amazes the careful citizen, who cannot 
understand how men can be satisfied with an 



154 d Strange Delusion 

existence which gives them no guarantee of 
comfort or lasting domicile from one day 
to the other. Yet, a very great number of 
grave and sensible men and women are but 
tramps in what concerns the interests of their 
souls and the future life. 

Precisely as the social vagabond lives 
shiftlessly and without care for the earthly 
morrow, finding all his satisfaction in the 
moment's sweet-do-nothing, and indifferent 
to what may happen afterward, so these 
spiritual tramps go gravely on through the 
pleasant ways they find before their feet, and 
take no care whatever for that to-morrow 
ivhich will face them just beyond the uncer- 
tain gates of death. They are as shiftless 
for the hereafter as they are wise and pru- 
dent for to-day, and it is a strange delusion 
indeed, which makes them so satisfied and 
content with themselves and with their own 
wisdom, when they are forgetting and over- 
looking that momentous to-morrow which 
shall last for all eternity. 

This delusion is all the more terrible and 
sad because it deprives so many men and 
women of immense glory and delight through 
all eternity, which they could so easily get, 
if they were as careful and prudent about 



A Strange Delusion 155 

the life to come as they are about this present 
world. That same industry, forethought and 
care which is so effective in promoting and 
securing their temporal well-being and pros- 
perity, would be efficacious beyond measure 
to obtain for them in the world to come an 
unthinkable weight of glory. Yet they 
calmly forget and overlook the near and 
momentous realities of eternity which will 
last forever, while they so carefully provide 
for and value the shows and shadows of a 
life utterly uncertain in its duration and sure 
to end forever in some brief decades of 
years. 

Even those who are sincerely striving to 
make for themselves mansions in the home 
of eternity and who are solicitous about the 
everlasting things, are in danger of falling 
to some degree into that same strange delu- 
sion concerning the permanence and value of 
earthly goods. We are so utterly tied to 
the flesh and so immersed in time, that we 
grow to think and judge in terms of this 
world, and to consider this earth real and 
this life substantial, while the eternal verities 
seem shadowy and far away. The example 
of the world about us, which is so terribly 
intent on present things and so scornful or 



156 A Strange Delusion 

forgetful of the things eternal, has a more 
powerful influence on us than we dream. 
Worldliness, which is the love and trust in 
earthly possessions and earthly good things 
to the forgetfulness of God and of eternity, 
is one of the most subtle of spiritual temp- 
tations, and it enters into and possesses the 
mind and the soul of a man like an infection 
which strikes deep and poisons the soul with 
sickness before one is aware. 

It is necessary for us all, then, to struggle 
actively by prayer and meditation against 
this strange delusion of the permanence of 
earth and the enduring value of life. The 
soul must again and again be brought face 
to face with the moving doctrines of Christ, 
concerning the nothingness of the world and 
the preciousness of heaven and of eternity. 
We must look about us with the eyes of faith 
and try to esteem this life only as a prepara- 
tion for the life to come. We must deliber- 
ately school ourselves to refrain from and 
renounce the seeming goods of the world 
save in so far as they clearly help us toward 
the real and lasting goods of eternity. By 
such deliberate effort and careful self-disci- 
pline, we shall be able to guard ourselves, 
in great part at least, from the strange delu- 



A Strange Delusion 157 

sion which makes fools of so large a number 
of mankind. It is worth while to use great 
vigilance and ceaseless self-control to free 
ourselves from so pitiful an error — for solid 
though the world may seem, and strong 
though the current of our life may run, it 
will after all be but a very little while before 
the shadows of this world have given place 
to the enduring realities of the world to 
come. 



THINGS AS THEY ARE 

WE MAY be too modest to say so, but 
almost any one of us could suggest 
some improvements in the uni- 
verse! It would seem an extremely easy 
matter to us, by some obvious changes, to 
make the world a much better place to live 
in. In fact, we are surprised at times to 
note how inadequate some of the arrange- 
ments of creation seem. While we refrain 
from criticizing, still it appears to us very 
mysterious that God should tolerate things 
as they are. 

In our own character and circumstances 
we are especially apt to long for changes and 
ameliorations. When we reflect on our 
spiritual state and resolve amendment for 
the hundredth time, it is likely to occur to 
us that it would be so easy to be good if 
things were only a little different from what 
they are. If such and such an occasion for 
vexation did not so often come our way, 
what an extremely agreeable and placid 
person we could be! If such and such an 
individual could only be permanently 

158 



Things as They Are 159 

removed from our horizon, we should be 
charitable to all the rest of the world besides. 
If such and such a duty might only be elimi- 
nated from the list, the others would give 
us little inconvenience; we could get on 
almost perfectly. In a word, we could be so 
much better if things were only not precisely 
as they are. 

So, too, with our own disposition with 
which we wage an intermittent warfare all 
our lives. At first the outlines of our char- 
acter are like a new landscape to us — that 
is in our early youth. But little by little, 
aided by the gentle gestures of our friends 
or the severer pointings of our adversaries, 
we come to notice certain disagreeable prom- 
inences which stand out, like rugged and for- 
bidding peaks, against the sky-line of our 
disposition. These predominant faults, 
with their rocky contours, spoil the view, 
and it is against them that we bend the most 
part of our spiritual engineering, trying to 
hack them away by spiritual examens and 
carry them off by acts of the contrary vir- 
tues. We make some progress in the course 
of years but, alas ! seem only to succeed in 
altering the outline a little and in smoothing 
off some rugged corners. 



160 Things as They Are 

We pray to be relieved of these stony 
defects in our disposition. But the moun- 
tains remain, and we grow used to meeting 
them in the prospect of every day. It gives 
us, perhaps, some consolation to consider 
how much better we would be under slightly 
altered circumstances. There are numbers 
of persons spiritually inclined who are pros- 
pective saints. As soon as conditions change 
a little, they will begin working for perfec- 
tion in good earnest. Just at present they 
find it impracticable to be as good as they 
would wish. But after a bit, when circum- 
stances which are a hindrance to their good- 
ness have passed away, they will surprise 
every one by the sudden flowering out of 
their virtue. They are only waiting for 
things to become a little different from what 
they are ! 

But must not all this seem a bit funny in 
the sight of the angels? Must not those 
wise spirits look with pitying amusement 
upon our general inclination to put our sanc- 
tity in the future and make our goodness 
depend on some slight or considerable 
changes in the present structure of things? 
"We look before and after and long for 
what is not." But God has put our sancti- 



Things as They Are 161 

fication in the present and arranged for us 
the precise set of circumstances in which He 
wishes to see us work out our salvation and 
show our fidelity to His law. Our duty to 
God and our neighbor, the perfecting of our 
soul and the sum of our eternal glory must 
be done and wrought and gathered together 
in the midst of things as they are. 

The exact circumstances in which one finds 
oneself at any moment of this life have been 
brought to pass under the ruling providence 
of God. If not one of the birds of the air 
falls to the ground unless this heavenly 
Father knows, and if He works without 
ceasing to clothe the flowers of the field so 
that the least of them outshines, in the won- 
der of its raiment, Solomon in all his glory, 
how much more will He have care of the 
least detail that affects ourselves, who are 
the pinnacle of His creation, the apple of 
His eye and the treasure of His heart. In 
moving words, full of the sweetness of divine 
charity, He has told us of His unsleeping 
providence that shapes our ends. Using the 
comparison of the most devoted human love 
to express how much His own transcends all 
human affection, He has told us that even 
though a mother should forget the child of 



1 62 Things as They Are 

her womb, He will never forget us because 
we are in His sight forever. 

Consider, then, with what continual vigi- 
lance, unsleeping thought and all-powerful 
love the Almighty, who is the All-loving too, 
arranges each least detail of every instant 
of our lives. No matter in what circum- 
stances we find ourselves at any moment, we 
may be sure that every aspect of our situa- 
tion has been considered from all eternity 
by our Father who is in heaven, and 
approved or suffered to come to pass that 
He might test our love and experience our 
fidelity in just this combination of grace and 
difficulty, of encouragement and trial com- 
bined. It is God's will that shines from 
every circumstance about us. It is God's 
good pleasure that greets us at every turn 
of our lives. No aspect of any instant is 
too trivial to escape His vigilance. No 
point of our condition is too difficult or stub- 
born to be done away with, if He so pleases, 
by the strong right hand of His omnipotence. 

It is quite useless then for us to wish that 
circumstances were ever so little different, 
or to desire ever so slight a change in the 
designs of God. The long preliminaries 
to our salvation are over. The stage of this 



Things as They Are 163 

instant has been set from eternity. All 
heaven and earth have conspired together to 
give us this moment's opportunity. Through 
the long ages, God's will and the wills of 
men and the forces of blind matter have con- 
verged to furnish forth this breathless point 
of time to which an eternity has looked for- 
ward and to which an eternity will look back. 
In the midst of things as they are, our free 
will is summoned to show its love to God, its 
obedience to His law, its fidelity to the serv- 
ice of our neighbor for the love of God. 
We live in a fleeting instant, an indivisible 
moment of time. The past is utterly beyond 
our reach, the future utterly before it. It 
is quite impossible for us to act save in this 
flowing moment. In this precise and real 
instant of the moving "Now," our service 
must be rendered whose everlasting conse- 
quence runs swiftly from our instant of 
changing time and splashes and is congealed 
forever on the changeless shores of our 
eternity. 

We must be content, therefore, and we 
should be filled with delight at all the circum- 
stances which God has gathered together for 
our instant test of fidelity and love toward 
Him. Every detail of our present situation 



164 Things as They Are 

should be dear to us because it shines with 
the evident markings of God's will. Many 
causes have conspired together, through the 
slow and gradual ages, to bring this present 
instant to pass, with all its wealth of trial 
and pain and joy and grace and opportunity. 
To no other creature but to you alone has 
God assigned this precise chance of honoring 
and serving, of loving and glorifying Him. 
You should embrace all that the instant 
offers, and strive to drain the last drop of 
grace and of merit which God has poured 
into the chalice of this moment and now 
holds forth to you with exceeding love and 
expectation. 

What one may say of the exterior cir- 
cumstances of life, one may repeat of all 
those singularities of disposition and inte- 
rior trials which break the harmonious 
landscape of one's character with their 
rude and harsh and rocky contour. These 
also are allowed by God for our merit and 
perfection. In these also we must recog- 
nize the shining lineaments of His holy 
will. The anger that rises like a tide on 
little provocation, the sloth that weighs down 
the faculties of our soul, the selfishness that 
Resets us and the pride that plagues us, all 



Things as They Are 165 

these are merely so many opportunities of 
merit, so many calls to service. In the midst 
of these things as they are, God wills us to 
serve and honor Him. From each of us He 
requires a different character of service. To 
each He gives the allotted load of trials and 
imperfections. It is by taking things as they 
are, within and without us, and shaping them 
to God's will and service, that we shall make 
most profit of earth and merit most of 
heaven. 

"May the most just, most high, and most 
lovable will of God be done, praised, and 
exalted forever!" "Thou art just, O Lord,, 
and Thy judgments are right!" These and 
similar expressions should be often on our 
lips and deeply meant in our heart. The 
world as it is and our heart as it is, the' grace 
which God gives us, the opportunities which 
He sends, all things as they are, declare this 
holy will. True, our own sins and the sins 
of other men and those of the fallen angels, 
have changed and marred the universe, and 
many of the trials and the obstacles in our 
path come from these sins. Yet God wills 
that even these trials and obstacles shall be 
for us occasions of greater merit, for it is 
one of His divine prerogatives to draw good 



1 66 Things as They Are 

from evil. Even the temptations which our 
own past transgressions may occasion to us 
are opportunities of merit and of glory. 
We need only love God and be resigned to 
His will and all these things will work 
together for us unto justice. 

These are consoling and stirring thoughts 
and they transform the face of the world. 
Possessed with these convictions we shall no 
longer trouble about changing the universe 
nor live in rosy anticipations of a personal 
holiness which lies somewhere east of the 
sun and west of the moon. The little cir- 
cumstances of our daily lives will be for us 
incessant opportunities of merit. We will 
set courageously to work here and now to 
become holy. Then we shall realize the 
meaning of that saying, "To those that love 
God all things work together unto good." 
For we shall see the will of God and His 
vigilant love and providence, in each slight 
detail and changing circumstance, in each 
sorrow or delight, duty or chance or pain 
of things as they are. 



COURAGE 

There is one danger of the spiritual 
life concerning which not enough is 
said, one would think, either in books 
or in spiritual conferences. It is an insid- 
ious danger, which threatens those in par- 
ticular who are getting on in life and experi- 
ence, and which comes subtly and in disguise 
so that it is exceedingly difficult to detect and 
hard to fight against. The danger is — down- 
heartedness. A high and noble courage 
which is proof against even our own weak- 
ness and wretchedness, a perseverance in 
effort and striving in spite of the most des- 
perate discouragements, is an essential for 
reaching holiness. Without such a fine and 
strong temper of hopefulness and resolution, 
we shall never get by the dull days of spirit- 
ual languor or the fierce conflicts and appar- 
ent defeats which must come in the way of 
every pilgrim toward eternity. 

The need and the preciousness of this 
strong determination, this continual hopeful- 
ness and high courage in the face of one's 
own shortcomings and of difficulties from 

167 



1 68 Courage 

without and from within, are not always suffi- 
ciently realized even by those who are experi- 
enced in the ways of the spiritual life. It is 
such hope and courage which enable us to 
keep on steadfastly and to bear ourselves in 
the spiritual conflict with that perseverance 
and determination which are essential to 
every victory, whether of fleshly arms or of 
the spirit. 

To most of those who sincerely set them- 
selves to lead a holy life, there is a period 
which is generally known as the time of their 
conversion. This does not necessarily mean 
that they have turned away from paths of 
evil. It means that they have experienced 
a spiritual enlightening which makes them 
see the nothingness of life, the preciousness 
of eternity, and the single worth of following 
Christ Our Lord. They then resolve to 
choose a way of greater perfection and deter- 
mine to give themselves to the following of 
Christ. With some, this period is the time 
of their religious vocation, and they definitely 
turn aside from their former way of living 
and enter upon the path of the counsels, 
taking the vows of poverty, chastity, and 
obedience. With others, who are not called 
to a religious life, or who for one reason or 



Courage 169 

other cannot follow that call, the time of 
their conversion is marked by the definite 
resolve to lead what is called a pious life, 
living for the next world rather than this, 
and fixing their eyes on loftier ideals and 
nobler purposes than are common to the rest 
of mankind. In whatever way it comes, 
this time of conversion is a period of enthusi- 
asm and fervor. The hope of achieving 
personal holiness stirs the heart, and the 
example and the call of Christ move the will 
so that the one who experiences this new 
access of fervor forms lofty resolves and 
cherishes pure and noble hopes of becoming 
more perfect and like to Christ. Generally 
at this time God gives special graces which 
lift up and carry on the heart so that we are 
capable then of greater sacrifices and more 
definite and strong resolves than we had 
ever believed possible. 

But this bright time passes. We are not 
always to be fed on the milk and honey of 
children, but must eat dry bread and walk 
through difficult ways. It is precisely after 
the flush of the first resolutions and the hope 
and fervor of the beginning have faded and 
the dawn has given place to the calm light 
of day and perhaps to the heat of noontime, 



170 Courage 

that we begin, half-consciously perhaps and 
slowly, to fall sick from the blight and 
plague of discouragement. The soul, intent 
on perfection, begins by making alarming 
discoveries concerning its own weakness and 
misery, and these discoveries, if not offset 
by the thought of God's goodness, power and 
mercy, tend to dishearten the eagerly-aspir- 
ing beginner. 

The resolutions made in fervor now 
appear unpractical and incapable of accom- 
plishment. The earnest and even desperate 
efforts at self-improvement and perfection, 
have seemed to produce so little result that 
the soul looks forward with dismay even to 
attempting the things which seemed before 
in the flush of fervor to be so practicable 
and easy. Then is the time when discour- 
agement settles down like a heavy mist over 
the soul, chills the fine resolutions, freezes 
the earnest desire, and tempts the heart, 
which was intent on following Christ closely 
and in a glorious way, to settle down into 
an easy mediocrity and be satisfied with a 
bare minimum of spiritual accomplishment 
which would have seemed intolerably small 
in the first fervor of one's beginnings in 
perfection. 



Courage 171 

Now it is necessary to offset this tempta- 
tion with a very strong and definite effort to 
keep up our courage and to strengthen our 
resolutions. We have before us the example 
of Our Lord Himself, who was the most 
courageous of men. Though Our Lord 
was God Himself, yet He came to earth clad 
in a human nature and as man He was to 
redeem mankind. It was a most difficult 
and ungrateful task. He was come to 
redeem a race which did not wish to be 
redeemed; to reform a world sunk in corrup- 
tion. He had on His shoulders not the 
burden of one single imperfect human nature 
as have we, but of all humanity, which had 
stumbled and fallen and plunged into and 
was buried in sin. It required a courage 
beyond our conception to enable Him to take 
up this task at the will of His heavenly 
Father and to carry it on in spite of every 
obstacle. It was the agony of His task 
which brought the bloody sweat pouring 
from Him in the Garden of Olives, and it 
was the grief of it which broke His heart 
on the cross. Dull and insensible as we are 
to the horror of sin and its ingratitude, we 
can at least conjecture what courage was 
necessary for Our Lord when we consider 



172 Courage 

that all His life long He was face to face 
with all the sins of all time. He led what 
was apparently a most unsuccessful life. 
He was deserted and disappointed at last 
by all His friends save St. John and the 
Blessed Mother and the little group about 
the cross, and He died in the midst of what 
seemed to be the hugest failure and the 
most complete catastrophe that had ever 
ended a great career. 

Yet His courage carried Him through 
unflinchingly and never failed even in the 
hour of His agony. He is, therefore, a 
supreme example of courage to us. He has, 
besides, won for us all necessary strength 
by His sufferings and has taken away the 
bitterness and shame of our weakness and 
misery by bearing them Himself beforehand. 
He assures us of the victory if only we will 
be brave enough to struggle on in His bloody 
footsteps. 

The saints, and in particular the Blessed 
Mother, have given us also an example of 
this heroic and heavenly courage. After 
her blessed Son, no one had so much need of 
sublime bravery and unflinching resolution 
as the Mother of God. She was given the 
highest of all human offices and also the most 



Courage 173 

sorrowful. She was chosen to be the Mother 
of God and, therefore, was raised to the 
unthinkable and dizzy summit of all human 
dignity. But she was to be the Mother of 
a crucified Son and therefore she was doomed 
to explore the depths of human grief and 
suffering. Because she was so perfect, 
because every feeling of her heart was most 
sensible and right and keen, because she 
understood better than any other the malice 
of sin and the dignity of her Divine Son, and 
because she had the heart of a Mother 
raised to a sensibility and tenderness beyond 
what any of us can conceive, therefore she 
was capable of an extreme of agony which 
our dull feelings and weak affections cannot 
even faintly imagine. 

She was to suffer the extreme torment of 
seeing her Divine Son, the most beautiful 
and holy of mankind, reduced to a degree 
of misery and sorrow beyond conceiving. 
She was to suffer far more in His person than 
it would have been possible for her to suffer 
for herself alone, because she loved her Son 
a great deal more than she loved herself. 
She was to behold this Divine Son leave her 
side to go through the agony of His public 
life when He was surrounded and shamed 



174 Courage 

by the malicious and wicked-hearted scribes 
and pharisees and doctors of the law; 
pressed about by sinners, wearied by the 
multitudes, vexed intolerably by the igno- 
rance and weakness of His own apostles and 
disciples and in the end deserted by them 
all save a very few and subjected to unthink- 
able degradation, agony and rejection, to the 
passion and to His bitter death. 

To stand beneath the cross looking upon 
her ruined and broken Son, dying for three 
hours in an agony of dereliction, required 
a courage beyond all our thought. That 
the Blessed Virgin bore all this willingly 
and without complaint, without fainting or 
denial, shows her to have been the bravest 
of women and second only in heroic courage 
to her Divine Son Himself. 

Nor were the saints lacking in this heroic 
virtue. The courage which they showed in 
bearing their own weaknesses, overcoming 
temptations and inflicting on themselves the 
most excruciating penances while suffering 
long years of persecution from others, 
almost appals us when we gain some reali- 
zation of their interior life. 

They were indeed the champions of the 
cross. All of them went through some fiery 



Courage 175 

bath of suffering. While they persevered 
courageously in the regular practice of their 
pious duties, they were visited, many of them, 
with such interior dryness and desolation as 
seemed to wither the very fibers of their 
hearts. They had to endure discourage- 
ments from within and without, the perse- 
cution of friends, the hatred of the mistaken 
good folk about them, the torments of the 
devil and their own interior weaknesses. 
They fought through these trials — with tears 
and complaints, it may be, with agony and 
supplication — but they did find somehow the 
high courage to persevere until they came to 
the haven of rest and the crown of victory. 
Compared to their sufferings and struggles, 
what we shall have to endure in the way of 
affliction is light and easy. There is no com- 
parison between our difficulties and theirs. 
Shall it be said that we have not been brave 
enough to bear our little burdens, when they 
won to heaven over such rough and steep 
ways and with such an intolerable load? 

We should, therefore, strengthen our- 
selves with a constant determination to keep 
up a high courage and hopefulness in every 
phase of our spiritual life. We should 
examine ourselves as to how far we have 



176 Courage 

grown faint-hearted or are losing courage. 
We should fear with a hopeful and active 
fear to fall victims to spiritual discourage- 
ment. We should make an adamantine res- 
olution, proof by God's grace against any- 
thing that may come to us, never to lose 
courage in the least but to walk on as cheer- 
fully and to look as hopefully for the perfec- 
tion of which we are in search, as we did 
when we first resolved closely to follow Our 
Lord. 

It should be our desire also to encourage 
others and make them hopeful of better 
things. We can do great harm by giving 
people a low idea of their own capacity for 
goodness, as we sometimes do by slurs and 
captious criticisms. We can do immense 
good to them by letting them see what possi- 
bilites of well-doing are close before their 
feet. To show that we look for great things 
from others often gives them fresh strength 
and resolution. For ourselves and for 
others we should constantly pray and desire a 
great courage and high resolve never to cease 
or grow weary in the ways of God. 



CELESTIAL COMPANY 

IF only we could all of us keep more in 
the company of the saints ! There is no 
conceivable companionship so good for 
us as the companionship of heaven. It will 
be our everlasting felicity to associate in 
eternity with God-made-man, with His 
Blessed Mother and all the company of the 
angels and the saints, and then we shall enjoy 
that full and pure delight which comes from 
their converse and their friendship. 

But how many of us do not realize that 
even in this world, with all the limitations 
that surround us, it is still greatly possi- 
ble for us to enjoy very much of the com- 
pany of the saints, and that nothing can 
be more delightful and profitable for us 
than associating much with them. How is 
this to be done? For it seems to us that 
the saints are hopelessly removed from us. 
They lived and have died, some of them 
ages ago, some of them almost yesterday, 
but however near or remote their death has 
been they are still cut off from us by impassa- 

177 



178 Celestial Company 

ble barriers of time and place. They lived 
in other lands and in other periods of history, 
and how is it possible for us, now that they 
are dead and gone to heaven, to have them 
keep us company? How can we converse 
with them and hear what they say to us? 
How can we experience the delights of being 
with them and sharing in the sweet enthusi- 
asms, the transports of love of God and 
His mother, and the clear, pure heights of 
self-sacrifice and holiness in which they live? 
All this is not impossible, nor as difficult as 
it seems. We can still live with the saints 
in memory, hope and love, and enjoy their 
celestial company with no great difficulty and 
with extreme delight. 

The first requisite for enjoying the famil- 
iar company of the saints with all its benefits, 
is that we should make a practice of reading 
their blessed lives. The biography of the 
saints is very rich and various, much more 
so than we dream. Their letters have been 
kept with the greatest care, and the traits of 
their lives and characters have been sketched 
with extreme fidelity. Whole libraries are 
filled with these books, which contain the 
most glorious records of our humanity. The 
heroic annals of God's champions record 



Celestial Company 179^ 

the most splendid achievements to which 
human nature has ever attained. Reading 
such books one grows familiar with the pos- 
sibilities of our human nature for goodness 
and for holiness. The long course of his- 
tory, so dark in many ways, and so full of 
human crime and wickedness, is relieved and 
lit up by these bright annals of the saints. 
The extreme variety of their characters and 
achievements almost startles us as we read. 
Some of them were little and obscure during 
all their lives, and only their death revealed 
through God's special providence, the secret 
of their sanctity. Others were men and 
women of great rank and station, held splen- 
did places in the chronicles of their time and 
powerfully affected the destinies of peoples 
and nations. Some were blessed with the 
greatest talents, and shone almost as much by 
their genius and their wisdom as by the love 
of God and their neighbor. Others were un- 
learned and simple, and their one claim to 
greatness is their great sanctity. Some 
sought solitude, so that they might work 
out more faithfully the inspirations of God. 
Others lived the heroic life of patience and 
self-denial and charity, in the midst of the 
courts of kings. The immense variety of 



180 Celestial Company 

their characters, the various ways in which 
they were led by Divine Providence, the 
extreme difference of their ways of acting, 
and their achievements, make their lives the 
more interesting, while at the same time one 
always sees the same love of God, the same 
charity toward the neighbor, the recurring 
traits of self-sacrifice, the purity, the self- 
devotion, which are the essence of their 
sanctity. 

Reading such books, one grows in time 
into a personal friendship with the saints. 
They become as real to us as our daily associ- 
ates and indeed much better known to us. It 
is often hard for us to know those we deal 
with, but the saints, transparent in their 
motives, candid and sincere in all they said 
and did, open their hearts to us in their 
letters and in their biographies, and they 
speak to us more truly and eloquently from 
books than living persons do in our daily 
intercourse with them. 

As one reads the lives of the saints one 
gradually grows intimate with their motives 
and the springs of their actions, and so one 
can readily conjecture what they thought and 
felt and intended in some thrilling passage 
of their experience. This is the more easy, 



Celestial Company 1 8 1 

because all they do and say is motived by 
charity, and because it is the love of God 
and their neighbor which is the simple and 
sufficient motive of their thoughts and words 
and acts. What an extreme pleasure to grow 
so familiar with the saints, to live in dailv 
intercourse with them, to think their 
thoughts, live over again their holy actions, 
have always before us their glorious exam- 
ples! But this is not the only benefit we 
obtain from the company of the saints. In 
becoming familiar with them we also learn 
a great deal about the times in which they 
lived, the different periods of the Church, the 
history of governments and nations, and, 
above all, the development and course of 
the people among whom they dwelt and from 
whom they have sprung. 

It is rather a recent phase of historical 
study to seek to know the people rather 
than their rulers, to understand the currents 
of ordinary life through history, rather than 
to abandon oneself entirely to the exploits 
of kings and to the wars and treaties which 
engaged them. 

But the lives of the saints are the chroni- 
cles of the Catholic people, because they 
sprang from the people, were intimately as- 



1 8 2 Celes tial Co mpany 

sociated with the people, and because their 
sentiments and ways are often strongly char- 
acteristic of those among whom they live. 
Thus in reading the lives of the saints one 
acquires a great fund of human experience, 
gains prudence from their example, and 
learns how great enterprises are begun, and 
how great designs are brought to success. 
One might cite many examples of this. 

Thus, in studying the life of St. Augustine 
one learns more than most histories tell of 
the eventful time in which the life of the 
Roman Empire was breaking down under 
the blows of the barbarian, as they hemmed 
about the old civilization on every side. 

In the life of St. Louis of France one sees 
the feudal system at its best, the power of 
a good king and the majesty of a great 
nation being welded together by a wise and 
potent ruler. One sees, too, the splendid 
achievements of the Crusaders, until one 
comes to that moving and thrilling sacrifice 
of liberty, and even life itself, which the 
true Christian was ever willing to offer as his 
part toward the redemption of his Saviour's 
sepulchre. 

In the days of St. Vincent de Paul one 
sees the glory and pomp of a great monarchy 



Celestial Company 183 

swaying the world by ideas no less than by 
diplomacy. In the life of this holy man 
one perceives, too, the better and holier life 
which was to redeem that worldly age. One 
sees the beginnings of modern charities grow 
under his hand, the orphanages, the asylums, 
the works of pity and mercy, which were to 
bless the slums of cities and the penury of 
country places, and to form the glory of 
the charity of succeeding centuries. 

But most precious of all the results of 
the frequent reading of the lives of the saints 
is that their example will make us also 
heavenly-minded. This is a distracted and 
worldly age. We do not realize ourselves 
how much the stir and confusion, the interest 
and variety of every-day life nowadays dis- 
tracts our heart and takes our thoughts from 
God and from heaven. The great danger 
of worldliness is that it is a sweet enemy, 
a tempting aggressor. It steals our heart 
and mind away, without our being sensible 
of the loss. Earthly motives, selfish consid- 
erations, thoughts and sights which arc of 
the earth, earthy, ideas and speculations 
which pertain only to time and are connected 
with our interest and enjoyment, gradually 
wean the heart from the consideration of 



1 84 Celestial Company 

heavenly things and from the thought of God 
and of eternity. 

We need an antidote, therefore, to all, let 
us repeat it again, this distraction and con- 
fusion. We need some means of turning our 
minds and hearts away from this earth and 
helping them to ascend toward heaven. Few 
means are more powerful than the frequent 
reading of the lives of the saints. The 
example which these heroes of God give us 
of self-denial, patience in affliction, contempt 
of the world and an immense desire to suffer 
for God's sake and for His love, produces a 
deep impression on our memory, our imag- 
ination and our intelligence. In this way 
we gradually become more detached from 
the earth. Our heart grows more fixed on 
heavenly things. One can easily understand 
the significance of that often repeated story 
of St. Francis de Sales that he always pre- 
ferred to read books whose authors' names 
began with the letter S — he means those 
written by the saints. These books have 
immense authority and are more moving than 
books written by men and women not so 
united with God or not intent on eternal 
interests. 

If this is true of the writings of the saints, 



Celestial Company 185 

it is also true of their lives when these are 
faithfully recorded, because the lives of the 
saints are their greatest work, their most 
sublime achievement, the most splendid of 
all books, the volumes which contain saintly 
thoughts and words and deeds the most glori- 
ously detailed. What wonder, therefore, 
that the saints themselves loved nothing so 
much as to read the lives of saints, and that 
many of them owed their first conversion and 
the beginning of their fervor to the frequent 
perusal of those lives. 

Every one remembers that classic instance 
of St. Ignatius, who was a worldly young 
man in his early years. Stricken down by a 
providential cannon-ball at the siege of 
Pampeluna, he was compelled to pass weary 
days on his couch, waiting for the wound to 
heal, and he called for some romances to 
help pass the tedious hours. They brought 
him the life of Christ and the lives of the 
saints, which were happily the only things in 
his ancestral library. At first he read them 
with great distaste, but after a while he saw 
the glory and the splendor of sainthood and 
cried out, u Dominic has done this, Francis 
has done it. Why should not I also achieve 
a similar holiness ?" It was the beginning 



1 86 Celestial Company 

of that life of splendid sanctity which gave 
the Church a saint and after ages the Com- 
pany of Jesus. So has many a one been 
turned from worldly dreams and pursuits to 
serve and love God heroically by reading of 
the life of a saint. 

It sometimes happens, and not without 
reason, that the lives of the saints are difficult 
of perusal. "They are dry," say some. 
"They exaggerate," say others. "They do 
not show enough of the human side of the 
saint. They make him or her an impossibly 
perfect person, and cover up all the little 
faults and petty trials which it would give 
ordinary human beings some comfort and 
encouragement to hear about." These are 
objections to be sure. Lives of the saints, 
are, I must confess, imperfect. But so is 
everything else in this world. One can afford 
to overlook their imperfections for the sake 
of the great good they bring us. 

There is a notable improvement of late 
years in the way in which lives of the saints 
are written. The style of writing changes to 
suit the changing age. The marvels and the 
miracles in their careers are not so exclus- 
ively emphasized, we might say, as of old. 



Celestial Company 187 

These lives are more pleasant to read, and 
perhaps more profitable too. Yet no chron- 
icle which truly depicts the words and the 
deeds of God's heroes should be uninteresting 
to us. "All sermons are good," a pious soul 
used to say; "one can get something out of 
every sermon." So we may say, all lives of 
the saints are good; one can get some benefit 
from them all. 

It is an excellent counsel, then, to all those 
who wish to go forward in God's service, 
frequently to read the lives of the saints, 
and to form a habit of taking up at some 
particular time of the day, as we have sug- 
gested in another chapter, one of these books 
which help us forward so powerfully on the 
way to heaven. If we form the habit, it will 
grow and increase with us as life goes on. 
We shall grow so accustomed to the company 
of the saints and delight so much in their 
society that we shall feel lost unless we feed 
our mind and heart on these chronicles. 
When this time comes we shall have our 
feet firmly set on the way to sanctity. "Tell 
me your company," says the old adage, "and 
I will tell you what you are." There is no 
company so sacred or potent for good, so 






i88 



Celestial Company 



powerful against evil, which brings so great 
blessings for us, so many benefits and riches 
to our mind and heart, as the constant friend- 
ship of God's saints. 



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CATHOLIC'S READY ANSWER, 
THE. Hill, SJ. net, $2.00. 

CATHOLIC'S WORK IN THE 
WORLD. Husslein, S.J. »ri,$i.so. 

CEREMONIAL FOR ALTAR BOYS. 
Britt, O.S.B. net, $0.60. 

CHARACTERISTICS AND RELIG- 
ION OF MODERN SOCIALISM. 
Ming, S.J. i2mo. net, $2.50. 

CHILD PREPARED FOR FIRST 
COMMUNION. Zulueta, Pap.,*$o.o8. 

CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS. De- 
vtvter-Messmer. net, $3.50. 



CHRISTIAN EDUCATION. O'Con- 

nell. net, $1.00. 
CHRISTIAN FATHER. Cramer, net, 

CHRISTIAN MOTHER. Cramer, net, 
$0.85. 

CHURCH AND THE PROBLEMS OF 
TODAY, THE. Schmidt, net, $1.50. 

CORRECT THING FOR CATH- 
OLICS. Bugg. net, $1.25. 

DIVINE GRACE. Wirth. we*, $1.25 

EDUCATION OF OUR GIRLS. 
Shields, net, $1.50. 

EXPLANATION OF BIBLE HIS- 
TORY. Nash, net, $2.50. 

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MORALS. Stapleton. net, $1.25. 

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MORE CATECHISM. Kinkead. 
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MANDMENTS. Rolfus. net, $0.90. 

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OF CATHOLIC WORSHIP. Lam- 
bert-Brennan. Paper, $0.25; cloth, 
net, So. 90. 

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AND CEREMONIES OF THE 
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REGINA. St. Alphonsus. net, $1.2 5. 



h-J-00 



EXTREME UNCTION. Paper, *$o.i2. 

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ITY. Slater, SJ. net, $1.25. 

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IOUS LIFE. SCHLEUTER, SJ. fl,$0.7S- 

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$3.00. 
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EASY. Konings, C.SS.R. Cloth, 

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Paper, $0.25; cloth, net, $1.25. 

HOW TO COMFORT THE SICK. 
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LITTLE ALTAR BOY'S MANUAL. 

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phonsus. net. $0.75. 

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mann, C.SS.R. Paper, *$o.o8. 

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SHORT STORIES ON CHRISTIAN 
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SURE WAY TO A HAPPY MAR- 
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TRAINING OF CHILDREN AND OF VOCATIONS EXPLAINED. Cut flush, 



Cecilia. 



GIRLS IN THEIR TEENS. 

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$1.25. 
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Paper, *$o.i2. 



net, 



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WHAT THE CHURCH TEACHES. 

Drury. Paper, *$o.45; cloth, ne/,$o.9a. 
WHAT TIMES! WHAT MORALSI 

Semple, S.J. Cloth, net, $0.75. 



II. DEVOTION, MEDITATION, SPIRITUAL READING, 
PRAYER-BOOKS 



ABANDONMENT; or Absolute Sur- 
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Roche, S J. Paper, *o. 1 2 . 



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Garesche, SJ. net, $1.25. 



m. THEOLOGY, LITURGY, HOLY SCRIPTURE, PHILOSOPHY, 
SCIENCE, CANON LAW 



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WHAT CATHOLICS HAVE DONE 
FOR SCIENCE. Brennan. net, 
$1.50. 



IV. SERMONS 



CHRISTIAN MYSTERIES. Bono- 
mft.t.t. D.D.-Byrne. 4 vols., net, $9.00. 

EIGHT-MINUTE SERMONS. De- 
mouy. 2 vols., net, $4.00. 

HOMILIES ON THE COMMON OF 
SAINTS. Bonomelli-Byrne. 2 vols., 
net, $4.50. 

HOMILIES ON THE EPISTLES AND 
GOSPELS. Bonomelli-Byrne. 4 vols., 
net, $9.00. 

MASTER'S WORD, THE, LN THE 
EPISTLES AND GOSPELS. Flynn. 
2 vols., net, $4.00. 

POPULAR SERMONS ON THE CAT- 
ECHISM. Bambfrg-Thurston, S.J. 
$8.50. 
Canon Sheehan. net, 



3 vols., net 
SERMONS. 

$3.00. 
SERMONS 

MASSES. 

$2.50. 
SERMONS 



FOR CHILDREN'S 
Frassinetti-Lings. net, 

FOR THE SUNDAYS 
AND CHIEF FESTIVALS OF THE 



ECCLESIASTICAL YEAR. Pott- 
geisser, S.J. 2 vols., net, $5.00. 

SERMONS ON OUR BLESSED LADY. 
Flynn. net, $2.50. 

SERMONS ON THE BLESSED SAC- 
RAMENT. Scheurer-Lasance. net, 

SERMONS ON THE CHIEF CHRIS- 
TIAN VIRTUES. Hunolt-Wirth. 
net, $2.75. 

SERMONS ON THE DUTIES OF 
CHRISTIANS. Hunolt-Wirth. 

net, $2.75. 

SERMONS ON THE FOUR LAST 
THINGS. Hunolt-Wirth. ^,$2.75. 

SERMONS ON THE SEVEN DEADLY 

g*:SINS. Hunolt-Wirth. net, $2.75. 

SERMONS ON THE VIRTUE AND 
THE SACRAMENT OF PENANCE. 
Hunolt-Wirth. net, $2.75. 

SERMONS ON THE MASS, THE SAC- 
RAMENTS AND THE SACRA- 
MENTALS. Flynn. net,%2js. 



V. HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY, HAGIOLOGY, TRAVEL 



AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ST. IGNA- 
TIUS LOYOLA. O'Connor, S.J. 
net, $1.75. 

CAMLLLUS DE LELLIS. By a 
Sister of Mercy, net, $1.75. 

CHILD'S LIFE OF ST. JOAN OF 
ARC. Mannlx. net, $1.50. 

GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT OF 
THE CATHOLIC SCHOOL SYS- 
TEM IN THE UNITED STATES. 
Burns, C.S.C. net, $2.50. 

HISTORY OF THE CATHOLIC 
CHURCH. Brueck. 2 vols., net, 

HISTORY OF THE CATHOLIC 
CHURCH. Businger-Brennan. net, 

HISTORY OF THE CATHOLIC 
CHURCH. Bustnger-Brennan. 
net, TOo.75.^ 

HISTORY OF THE PROTESTANT 



REFORMATION. Cobbett-Gas- 

quet. net, $1.25. 
HISTORY OF THE MASS. O'Brien. 

net, $2.00. 
HOLINESS OF THE CHURCH IN 

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

Kempf, S.J. net, $2.75. 
LIFE OF ST. MARGARET MARY 

ALACOQUE. Illustrated. Bougaud. 

net, $2.75. 
LIFE OF CHRIST. Businger-Bren- 
nan. Illustrated. Half morocco, gilt 

edges, net, $15.00. 
LIFE OF CHRIST. Illustrated. Bus- 

INGER-MULLETT. net, $3.50. 

LIFE OF CHRIST. Cochem. net, 

LIFE 2 S OF ST. IGNATIUS LOYOLA. 

Genelli, SJ. net, $1.25. 
LIFE OF MADEMOISELLE LE 

GRAS. net, $1.25 



LIFE OF POPE PIUS X. Illustrated. 

net, $3.50. 
LIFE OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN. 

Rohner. net, $1.25. 
LITTLE LIVES OF THE SAINTS 

FOR CHILDREN. Berthold. we/, 

LITTLE PICTORIAL LIVES OF THE 
SAINTS. With 400 illustrations. 
net, $2.00. 

LIVES OF THE SAINTS. Butler. 
net, $1.25. 

LOURDES. Clarke, S.J. net, $1.25. 

MARY THE QUEEN. By a Relig- 
ious, net, $0.60. 

MIDDLE AGES, THE. Shahan. net, 

MI^LTOWN PASTOR, A. Conroy, 
S.J. net. $1.75. 

NAMES THAT LIVE IN CATHOLIC 
HEARTS. Sadlter. net, $1.25. 

OUR OWN ST. RITA. Corcoran, 
O.S.A. net, $1.50. 

PATRON SAINTS FOR CATHOLIC 
YOUTH. Manner. 3 vols. Each, 
net, $1.25. 

PICTORIAL LIVES OF THE SAINTS. 
With nearly 400 illustrations and over 
600 pages, net, $5.00. 

POPULAR LIFE OF ST. TERESA. 
L'abbe Joseph, net, $1.25. 

PRINCIPLES ORIGIN AND ES- 
TABLISHMENT OF THE CATH- 
OLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM IN THE 



UNITED STATES. Burns, C.S.C. 
net, $2 .50. 

RAMBLES IN CATHOLIC LANDS. 
Barrett, O.S.B. Illustrated, net, 
$3.sa 

ROMA. Pagan Subterranean and Mod- 
ern Rome in Word and Picture. By 
Rev. Albert Kuhn, O.S.B., D.D. 
Preface by Cardinal Gibbons. 617 
pages. 744 illustrations. 48 full-page 
inserts, 3 plans of Rome in colors. 
Sh x 12 inches. Red im. leather, gold 
side, net, $15.00. 

ROMAN CURIA AS IT NOW EXISTS. 
Martin, SJ. net, $2.50. 

ST. ANTHONY. Ward, net, $1.25. 

ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI. Dubois, 
S.M. net, $1.25. 

ST. JOAN OF ARC. Lynch, S.J. Illus- 
trated, net, $2.75. 

ST. JOHN BERCHMANS. De- 
lehaye, S.J.-Semple, S.J. net, $1.50. 

SAINTS AND PLACES. By 
John Ayscough. Illustrated, net, 
$3.00. 

SHORT LIVES OF THE SAINTS. 
Donnelly, net, $0.90. 

STORY OF THE DIVINE CHILD. 
Told for Children. Lings, net, $0.60. 

STORY OF THE ACTS OF THE 
APOSTLES. Lynch, SJ. Illus- 
trated, net. $2.75. 

WOMEN OF CATHOLICITY. Sad- 
lter. net, $1.25. 



VI. JUVENILES 



FATHER FINN'S BOOKS. 

Each, net, $1.50. 
BOBBY IN MOVTELAND. 
FACING DANGER. 
HIS LUCKIEST YEAR. A Sequel to 

"Lucky Bob." 
LUCKY BOB. 
PERCY WYNN; OR, MAKING A 

BOY OF HIM. 
TOMPLAYFAIR; OR, MAKING A 

START. 
CLAUDE LIGHTFOOT; OR, HOW 

THE PROBLEM WAS SOLVED. 
HARRY DEE; OR, WORKING IT 

OUT. 
ETHELRED PRESTON; OR, THE 

ADVENTURES OF A NEW- 
COMER. 
THE BEST FOOT FORWARD; 

AND OTHER STORIES. 
CUPID OF CAMPION. 
THAT FOOTBALL GAME, AND 

WHAT CAME OF IT. 



THE FAIRY OF THE SNOWS. 
THAT OFFICE BOY. 
HIS FIRST AND LAST APPEAR- 
ANCE. 
MOSTLY BOYS. SHORT STORIES. 

FATHER SPALDING'S BOOKS. 
Each, net, $1.50. 

SIGNALS FROM THE BAY TREE. 

HELD IN THE EVERGLADES. 

AT THE FOOT OF THE SAND- 
HILLS. 

THE CAVE BY THE BEECH 
FORK. 

THE SHERIFF OF THE BEECH 
FORK. 

THE CAMP BY COPPER RIVER. 

THE RACE FOR COPPER ISLAND. 

THE MARKS OF THE BEAR 
CLAWS. 

THE OLD MILL ON THE WITH- 
ROSE. 

THE SUGAR CAMP AND ATTER. 



S 



AD VENTURE WITHTHE APACHES. 

Ferry, net, $0.60. 
ALTHEA. Nirdlinger. net, $1.00. 
AS GOLD IN THE FURNACE. 

Copus, S.J. net, $1.50. 
AS TRUE AS GOLD. Mannix. net, 

$0.60. 
AT THE FOOT OF THE SAND- 
HILLS. Spalding, S.J. net, $1.50. 
BELL FOUNDRY. Schaching, net, 

$0,60. 
BERKLEYS, THE. Wight. net, 

$0.60. 
BEST FOOT FORWARD, THE. Finn, 

SJ. net, $1.50. 
BETWEEN FRIENDS. Aumerle. 

net, $1.00. 
BISTOURL Melandri. net, $0.60. 
BLISSYLVANIA POST-OFFICE. 

Taggart. net, $0.60. 
BOBBY IN MOVTELAND. Finn, S.J. 

net, $1.50. 
BOBO'LINK. Waggaman. net, $0.60. 
BROWNIE AND I. Aumerle. w,$i.oo. 
BUNT AND BILL. Mulholland. 

net, $0.60. 
BY BRANSCOME RIVER. Taggart. 

net, $0.60. 
CAMP BY COPPER RIVER. Spald- 
ing, SJ. net, $1.50. 
CAPTAIN TED. Waggaman. ^,$1.25. 
CAVE BY THE BEECH FORK. 

Spalding, SJ. net, $1.50. 
CHILDREN OF CUPA. Mannix. net, 

$0.60. 
CHILDREN OF THE LOG CABIN. 

Delamare. net, $1.00. 
CLARE LORAINE. " Lee." n, $1.00. 
CLAUDE LIGHTFOOT. Finn, SJ. 

net, $1.50. 
COBRA ISLAND. Boyton, SJ. net, 

CUPA REVISITED. Mannix. net, 

CUPID OF CAMPION. Finn, SJ. 
net, $1.50. 

DADDY DAN. Waggaman. net, 
$0.60. 

DEAR FRIENDS. Nirdlinger. net, 
$1.00. 

DIMPLING'S SUCCESS. Mulhol- 
land. net, $0.60. 

ETHELRED PRESTON. Finn, SJ. 
net, $1.50. 

EVERY-DAY GIRL, AN. Crowley. 
net, $0.60. 

FACING DANGER. Finn, S J. net, 

FAIRY OF THE SNOWS. Finn, S J. 
net, $1.50. 



FINDING OF TONY. Waggaman. 

net, $1.25. 
FIVE BIRDS IN A NEST. Delamare. 

net, $1.00. 
FIVE O'CLOCK STORIES. By a 

Religious, net, $1.00. 
FLOWER OF THE FLOCK. Egan. 

net, $1.50. 
FOR THE WHITE ROSE. Htnkson. 

net, $0.60. 
FRED'S LITTLE DAUGHTER. 

Smith, net, $0.60. 
FREDDY CARR'S ADVENTURES. 

Garrold, SJ. net, $1.00. 
FREDDY CARR AND HIS FRIENDS. 

Garrold, SJ. net, $1.00. 
GOLDEN LILY, THE. Hlnkson. net, 

$0.60. 
GREAT CAPTAIN, THE. Htnkson. 

net, $0.60. 

HALDEMAN children, the. 

Mannix. net, $0.60. 
HARMONY FLATS. Whitmire. net, 

$1.00. 
HARRY DEE. Finn, S J. net, $1.50. 
HARRY RUSSELL. Copus, SJ. net, 

HEIROF DREAMS, AN. O'Malley. 

net, $0.60. 
HELD IN THE EVERGLADES. 

Spalding, SJ. net, $1.50. 
HIS FIRST AND LAST APPEAR- 
ANCE. Finn, SJ. net, $1.50. 
HIS LUCKIEST YEAR. Finn, SJ. 

net, $1.50. 
HOSTAGE OF WAR, A. Bonesteel. 

net, $0.60. 
HOW THEY WORKED THEIR WAY. 

Egan. net, §1.00. 
IN QUEST OF ADVENTURE. Man- 
nix. net, $0.60. 
IN QUEST OF THE GOLDEN 

CHEST. Barton, net, Si. 00. 
JACK. By a Religious, H.CJ. net, 

$0.60. 
JACK-O'LANTERN. Waggaman. 

net, $0.60. 
JACK HILDRETH ON THE NILE. 

Taggart. net, $1.00, 
JUNIORS OF ST. BEDE'S. Bryson. 

net, $1.00. 
JUVENILE ROUND TABLE. First 

Series net Si ko 
JUVENILE ROUND TABLE. Second 

Series, net, $i.«;o. 
KLONDIKE PICNIC, A. Donnelly. 

net, $1.00. 
LEGENDS AND STORIES OF THE 

HOLY CHILD JESUS. Lutz. net, 

$1,00. 



LITTLE APOSTLE ON CRUTCHES. 

Delamare. net $0.60. 
LITTLE GIRL FROM BACK EAST. 

Roberts, net, $0.60. 
LITTLE LADY OF THE HALL. 

Ryeman. net, $0.60. 
LITTLE MARSHALLS AT THE 

LAKE. Ndcon-Roulet. net, $1.00. 
LITTLE MISSY. Waggaman. net, 

$0.60. 
LOYAL BLUE AND ROYAL SCAR- 
LET. Taggart. net, $1.50. 
LUCKY BOB. Finn, S J. net, $1.50. 
MADCAP SET AT ST. ANNE'S. Bru- 

nowe. net, $0.60. 
MAD KNIGHT, THE. Schaceing. 

net, $0.60. 
MAKING OF MORTLAKE. Copus, 

S.J. net L $i.$o. 
MAN FROM NOWHERE. Sadlier. 

net, $1.00. 
MARKS OF THE BEAR CLAWS. 

Spalding, S.J. net, $1.50. 
MARY TRACY'S FORTUNE. Sad- 
lier. net, $0.60. 
MILLYAVELING. Smith. nei,$i.oo. 
MIRALDA. Johnson, net, $0.60. 
MORE FIVE O'CLOCK STORIES. 

By a Religious, net, $1.00. 
MOSTLY BOYS. Finn, S.J. net, $1.50. 
MYSTERIOUS DOORWAY. Sadlier. 

net, $0.60. 
MYSTERY OF HORNBY HALL. 

Sadlier. net, $1.00. 
MYSTERY OF CLEVERLY. Barton. 

net, $1.00. 
NAN NOBODY. Waggaman. net, 

$0.60. 
NED RIEDER. Wehs. net, $1.00. 
NEW SCHOLAR AT ST. ANNE'S. 

Bruno we. net, $1.00. 
OLD CHARLMONT'S SEED-BED. 

Smith, net, $0.60. 
OLD MILL ON THE WITHROSE. 

Spalding, S.J. net, $1.50. 
ON THE OLD CAMPING GROUND. 

Manntx. net, $1.00. 
PANCHO AND PANCHITA. Man- 
nix, net, $0.60. 
PAULINE ARCHER. Sadlier. net, 

$0.60. 
PERCY WYNN. Finn,SJ. ^,$1.50. 
PERIL OF DIONYSIO. Mannix. 

net, $0.60. 
PETRONILLA. Donnelly. net, 

$1.00. 
PICKLE AND PEPPER. Dorsey. 

net, $1.50. 
PILGRIM FROM IRELAND. Car- 

not. net, $0.60* 



PLAYWATER PLOT, THE. Wagga- 
man. net, $1.25. 

POLLY DAY'S ISLAND. Roberts. 
net, $1.00. 

POVERINA. Btjckenham. net, $1.00. 

QUEEN'S PAGE, THE. Htnkson. net, 
$0.60. 

QUEEN'S PROMISE, THE. Wagga- 
man. net, $1.25. 

QUEST OF MARY SELWYN. Clem- 
entia. net, $1.50. 

RACE FOR COPPER ISLAND. Spald- 
ing, S.J. net, $1.50. 

RECRUIT TOMMY COLLINS. 
Bonesteel. net, $0.60. 

ROMANCE OF THE SILVER SHOON. 
Bearne, S.J. net, $1.50. 

ST. CUTHBERT'S. Copus, S.J. net, 
$1.50. 

SANDY JOE. Waggaman. net, $1.25. 

SEA-GULL'S ROCK. Sandeau. net, 
$0.60. 

SEVEN LITTLE MARSHALLS. 
Nixon-Roulet. net, $0.60. 

SHADOWS LIFTED. Copus, S.J. 
net, $1.50. 

SHERIFF OF THE BEECH FORK. 
Spalding, S.J. net, $1.50. 

SHIPMATES. Waggaman. net, $1.25. 

SIGNALS FROM THE BAY TREE. 
Spalding, S.J. net, $1.50. 

STRONG ARM OF AVALON. Wag- 
gaman. net, $1.25. 

SUGAR CAMP AND AFTER. Spald- 
ing, S.J. net, $1.50. 

SUMMER AT WOODVILLE. Sad- 
lier. net, $0.60. 

TALES AND LEGENDS OF THE 
MIDDLE AGES, de Capella. net, 
$1.00. 

TALISMAN, THE. Sadlier. »e/,$i.oo. 

TAMING OF POLLY. Dorsey. net, 

THATFOOTBALL GAME. Finn, S.J. 

net, $1.50. 
THAT OFFICE BOY. Finn, S.J. net, 

THREE GIRLS AND ESPECIALLY 
ONE. Taggart. net, $0.60. 

TOLD IN THE TWILIGHT. Salome. 
net, $1.00. 

TOM LOSELY; BOY. Copus, S.J. 
net, $1.50. 

TOM PLAYFAIR. Finn, SJ. net, 

TOM^S LUCK-POT. Waggaman. net, 

$0.60. 
TOORALLADDY. Walsh, net, $0.60. 
TRANSPLANTING OF TESSIE. 

Waggaman. net, $1.25. 



10 



TREASURE OF NUGGET MOUN- 
TAIN. Taggart. net, $1.00. 

TWO LITTLE GIRLS Mack, net, 
$0.60. 

UNCLE FRANK'S MARY. Clemen- 
tia. net, $1.50. 



UPS AND DOWNS OF MARJORIE. 

Waggaman. net, $0.60. 
VIOLIN MAKER. Smith, net, $o.6q 
WINNETOU, THE APACHE 

KNIGHT. Taggart. net, $1.00. 
YOUNG COLOR GUARD. Bone- 
steel, net, $0.60. 



VH. NOVELS 



ISABEL C. CLARKE'S GREAT NOV- 
ELS. Each, net, $2.00. 
THE LIGHT ON THE LAGOON. 
THE POTTER'S HOUSE. 
TRESSIDER'S SISTER. 
URSULA FINCH. 
THE ELSTONES. 
EUNICE. 

LADY TRENT'S DAUGHTER. 
CHILDREN OF EVE. 
THE DEEP HEART. 
WHOSE NAME IS LEGION. 
FINE CLAY. 
PRISONERS' YEARS. 
THE REST HOUSE. 
ONLY ANNE. 
THE SECRET CITADEL. 
BY THE BLUE RIVER. 

ALBERTA: ADVENTURESS. L'Er- 

mtte. net, $2.00. 
BACK TO THE WORLD. Champol. 

net, $2.00. 
BARRIER, THE. Baztn. net $1.65. 
BALLADS OF CHILDHOOD. Poems. 

Earls, SJ. net, $1.50. 
BLACK BROTHERHOOD, THE. 

Garrold, SJ. net, $2.00. 
BOND AND FREE. Connor, n, $1.00. 
BUNNY'S HOUSE. Walker. », $2.00. 
"BUT THY LOVE AND THY 

GRACE." Finn, SJ. net, $1.50. 
BY THE BLUE RIVER. Clarke. 

net, $2.00. 
CARROLL DARE. Waggaman. net, 

$1.25. 
CIRCUS-RIDER'S DAUGHTER. 

Brackel. net, $1.25. 
CHILDREN OF EVE. Clarke, net, 

$2.00. 
CONNOR D'ARCY'S STRUGGLES. 

Bertholds. net, $1.25. 
CORINNE'S VOW. Waggaman. net, 

$1.25. 
DAUGHTER OF KINGS, A. Hink- 

son. net, $2.00. 
DEEP HEART, THE. Clarke, net, 

$2.00. 
DENYS THE DREAMER. Htnkson. 

net, $2.00, 



DION AND THE SIBYLS. Keon. 

net, $1.25. 
ELDER MISS AINSBOROUGH, THE 

Taggart. net, $1.25. 
ELSTONES, THE. Clarke, net, 

$2.00. 
EUNICE. Clarke, net, $2.00. 
FABIOLA. Wiseman, net, $1.00. 
FABIOLA'S SISTERS. Clarke, net, 

FATAL BEACON, THE. Brackel. 

net, $1.25. 
FAUSTULA. Ayscough. net, $2.00. 
FINE CLAY. Clarke. n*t, $2.00. 
FLAME OF THE FOREST. Bishop. 

net, $2.00. 
FORGIVE AND FORGET. Ltngen. 

net, $1.25. 
GRAPES OF THORNS. Waggaman. 

net, $1.25. 
HEART OF A MAN. Maher. net, 

$2.00. 
HEARTS OF GOLD. Edhor. n, $1.25. 
HEIRESS OF CRONENSTEIN. 

Hahn-Hahn. net, $1.00. 
HER BLIND FOLLY. Holt, net 

$1.25. 
HER FATHER'S DAUGHTER. Hlnk- 

son. net, $2.00. 
HER FATHER'S SHARE. Power. 

net, $1.25. 
HER JOURNEY'S END. Cooke. 

net, Si. 2 5. 
IDOLS; or THE SECRET OF THE 

RUE CHAUSSE D'ANTIN. de 

Navery. net, $1.25. 
IN GOD'S GOOD TIME. Ross, net, 

$1.00. 
IN SPITE OF ALL. Stantforth, net, 

IN THE DAYS OF KING HAL. 

Taggart. net, $1.25. 
IVY HEDGE, THE. Egan. net 

$2.00. 
KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS. 

Harrison, net, $1.25. 
LADY TRENT'S DAUGHTER. 

Clarke, net, $2.00. 
LIGHT OF HIS COUNTENANCE. 

Hart, net, $1.00. 



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